Knowledge-intensive industry, also known as "intelligence-intensive industry", takes intellectual capital as the main production factor, highly relies on intellectual achievements, and gathers a large number of intellectual employees. It is a type of industrial economy between labor-intensive industries and capital-intensive industries, characterized by the fact that unit labor occupies more capital than labor-intensive industries and less than capital-intensive industries.
In the production structure, the ratio of technical knowledge is significant, the cost of scientific research is high, the workers' cultural and technical level is high, the added value of products is high, and the growth rate is fast. Related professional positions mainly include technical invention, skill innovation, product research and development, management and operation, production optimization, engineering design, marketing, asset management, accounting planning, legal finance, consulting and so on.
Driven by the wave of knowledge economy, the scale of knowledge workers is also expanding rapidly, penetrating into all walks of life, especially knowledge-intensive industries such as information technology, financial services, legal services and management consulting.
Knowledge-intensive industries can be divided into knowledge-intensive manufacturing and knowledge-intensive service industries. Knowledge-intensive manufacturing refers to manufacturing enterprises with technology and innovation activities as the core and high added value of scientific knowledge in products and production processes. Knowledge-intensive service industry is an industry that serves the production, storage, use and dissemination of knowledge.