Where are the intellectual captitalists?

Stock markets are down, which is healthy. But it reminded me that the boom may finally may be over, and what happened in the last boom. In particular (since I have been working a lot with patents lately) about intellectual capital.
Remember the new economy? Money had no value, it was all about peoples attention. I was reminded about that by this post. Excellent reading, by the way. But attention is fickle - how do you monetize the fact that I gave you my attention a year ago? You can't. The fact of the matter is that the business model we have still is based on statistics: You have to have a lot of users to make any money (which is why Google is doing so well - how can they avoid it, when they are in a positive spiral?)
Now, if attention is the true value, and not how much money you happen to have in the bank (let us assume it is true for companies for a moment - it does not apply when my wife goes to the supermarket, that is for sure), then the value of a company is how much attention the participants in the company can grab.
This is not just a matter of standing in the street and handing out tissue packages, as you will see outside any railway station here in Japan. After all, the person handing out the tissues may grab my attention for about half a second, as I grab the tissue.
However, every time I take out the tissue, I will look at the package. So my attention will be grabbed. Strange, then, that there is no print on the tissues, and only on one side of the package . And that there are only 10 or so tissues in the package - if there were 100, my attention to the tissue package provider would increase tenfold. And it would crowd out the other nine packages of tissue in my pocket.
The lessons from this?
1. The attention given to the company providing the tissue is much larger than the one given to the person distributing them. So in terms of my attention, they receive much more value.
2. I just suggested several ways of increasing the attention value out of the tissues. That (might) give me a share in the attention value of all tissues handed out using these changes. However small, it aggregates.
Which brings me to the point about intellectual capital. If I work in a company where people consistently come up with new ways of grabbing more attention from other people, that will be a more valuable company than the one who just hands out tissue like they always used to. The trick is to measure this, and that is where Leif Edvinsson and his theories comes in.
Of course, all this potential value has no value unless it can be turned into monetary value. I.e. if I have a company chock full of intellectual capital, but there is nothing to stick it with. I can not sell the company. And so the attention I might grab is worthless.
Enter patents, and corporate secrets, and even why you should document your software. But more about that some other time.