A couple of millennia ago, in slave economies, the key assets were people. Under feudalism, the key assets became land. If you owned land, you could create wealth. Under industrial capitalism, the key assets were physical plant, physical resources, and financial capital. Today, physical plant and factories are becoming unimportant.
Cisco is the most valuable manufacturing company in the world, and it doesn t have any factories.
Even financial capital has become a fleeting asset. The only meaningful form of capital is intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is commonly understood to mean several different things. When you apply the Net to each of those factors, they become transformed into something Tapscott calls digital capital. With digital capital, you can have people, but you don t have to own them.