The work of Baruch Lev and many other experts have shown that the "intangible value gap" between book value and market value easily can run to 80%. This held true through the mid 1990s until the 2008 financial crisis. In January 2009 Intellectual Asset Magazine reported that corporate intangible values in the U.S. had collapsed within 18 months, from a median of 70% of market capitalization to under 50%. These figures have since rebounded along with the recovery in the stock market.

Many efforts are underway to redefine wealth and value from a whole-system perspective. These efforts include Balanced Scorecards, Intellectual Capital, Triple-Bottom-Line, and other sustainability approaches. We also now appreciate that exchanges of knowledge and other intangibles are key to building these intangible assets. The emergence of these perspectives suggests that full understanding of value, at both the enterprise and macroeconomic levels, must include intangible value domains.

In the years since this model was first proposed Intellectual Capital and intangibles have become well recognized at the level of firms, industries, cities, regions, and nation-states. There is quite a large body of literature in the field, and many different intangible domain models have been proposed besides this one. Nonetheless, these basic categories are well recognized.