A manufactured widget today has much more brain content than ever before.
Armies of engineers, designers, market specialists are engineering, designing, optimizing, marketing it.
Manufactured widgets do not come any more as a standard commodity. They have to be different. They have to be unique. They have to have options and be customizable.
It takes today 15 years and billions of dollars of intellectual work to design a new aircraft type, and hundreds need to be sold to get the money of its design back.
Fifty years ago it took a few million dollars, a handful of engineers and two years. A few dozen of models sold, and that was enough to ensure fortune for the manufacturing company.
The same trend is at work in the automotive industry. Developing a new car type takes billions of dollars of intellectual work.
So, even standard manufactured widgets contain a lot more intellectual work than a few decades ago.
Not only manufacturing industries loose weight compared to the services industry, but even within them, the shift has occurred. When you buy a car, a large chunk of its price is to pay for intellectual work. Not for extracting and refining the raw material, or manufacturing the car. For pure intellectual work.
The Fourth Revolution is already at work in the economy.
