Of every million ideas for a high-tech business, it is estimated that only six become public companies. But adopting the right organizational model and employment practices can help improve those odds, according to a group of researchers at Stanford and MIT.The findings are based on data gathered by the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), which has tracked 167 young high-tech companies in Silicon Valley since 1994. The SPEC team, headed by Stanford professors James Baron and Michael Hannan and MIT's Diane Burton, began by identifying five organizational blueprints based on employers' ideas about how work and employment should be organized: specifically, the nature of employee attachment, the processes used to coordinate and control work, and the best criteria for selecting employees.The engineering model describes companies that attract employees by offering challenging work, that emphasize informal peer-group control, and that hire people for specific skills. (Of the 167 companies surveyed, 31% were founded using this model.)The star model refers to companies (8% of those surveyed) that expect employees to internalize a strong professional commitment to excellence and require relatively little control. In this model, employees are selected according to their long-term potential.T
