Take a walk through King’s Cross station most days of the week, and you will see a crowd of people gathered among the usual rush of commuters and weary travellers awaiting the umpteenth delayed London-to-Leeds service.

This isn’t the complaints queue for cancellations. These people have travelled from further afield than Bradford – from South Korea, the US , France and Germany – to wait for a train that doesn’t even exist.

Having started as a humble homage to the Harry Potter books, the gap between platforms nine and 10has developed into one of the biggest tourist attractions in the capital. Alongside the plaque marking the fictional platform 9¾ and the luggage trolley stuck halfway into the wall, there is a gift shop and professional photographer. There are always queues. This is a lucrative combination of capitalism and the human imagination.

As a metaphor for the future of the British economy, the boy wizard created by JK Rowling and the queues for the Hogwarts Express are apt.

Advanced economies around the world are increasingly moving away from producing tangible goods to become more adept at creating intangible value – through branding, intellectual property and computer software – of the kind exemplified by the Harry Potter franchise. Once upon a time wealth was defined by physical assets. Nowadays companies like Amazon and Google rank as among the most valuable in the world despite making very little of physical worth.

Herein lies the problem for Britain. Besides figuring out how to tax the seemingly magical profits of the internet firms, the rise of the intangible economy poses the UK with two tough questions.

First, there is the problem with measurement. At the end of next month, Jonathan Haskel, an expert in intangible economics at Imperial College, will become a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee to help Threadneedle Street better understand the challenges ahead.

Answering questions from the Treasury select committee last month before his appointment, he used the example of Harry Potter as a “bundle of intangible assets”, telling MPs: “It is the creative copyright from the book. It is the software that goes into the movie. It is the branding. It is the set design that gives you all these gothic decorations that you see in the film, in the play and that kind of thing. There is a whole bundle of intangible assets. The economy is moving much more in that direction.”

Haskel has written a book on the subject, Capitalism Without Capital, to explain the challenges. Principal among them is measuring the gains for the economy from things that cannot be held firmly by hand.

Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, takes this further, pointing out that about 80bn photographs were taken all over the world at the turn of the millennium, at a cost of approximately 50 cents (38p) each using a traditional camera. By 2015, smartphones enabled as many as 1.6tn photographs to be taken for free. While GDP – the universal economic measure of expenditure, production and earnings – should rise with economic progress, it fails to capture this shift. The loss in terms of foregone production and sales of cameras actually means GDP goes the other way.

The economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers and Avinash Gannamaneni have tried to measure the value of free digital goods and have come up with staggering results. Overall, they say, our use of search engines, email and other products like social media and digital maps should cost as much as $25,700 (£19,560) a year per typical internet user if it was not free. This is yet more value missing in action from the modern economy.

Some monetary policy hawks argue higher interest rates are required because the economy may be performing better than the figures, missing these elements, appear to suggest. But they would be wrong to believe Britain is perfectly placed to benefit from the intangible economy. There are many things holding back its development. Which brings us to the second point in the debate about intangibles: finance.

Like the Dementors in Rowling’s books, the banking industry acts to sap the vitality of the intangible economy. Most economists agree the big thing needed in Britain is greater levels of investment, particularly as Brexit discourages firms from spending. But there are significant barriers for borrowing to invest in intangible assets from the current financial setup.

In the UK, banks favour lending for property over and above loans to other areas. After the financial crisis, they demanded greater security for lending. Regulators at the Bank of England have pushed them in this direction, too. Safety first, so the story goes, lest the crash reoccurs.

But banks could do more, rather than simply crawling over one another to lend against physical collateral – such as a home, or a factory or piece of machinery for a business. Our economy suffers as a consequence, with inflated house prices and not enough being lent to new businesses.

Getting a loan for an investment in area where the banks cannot demand security in exchange is much more difficult. It ought not to be, in the right circumstances. It’s an issue latched on to by the Labour party with zeal. It argues that the Royal Bank of Scotland should be fully nationalised, and then broken up into a network of community banks in order to spur greater levels of productive lending to small businesses trying to tap into this new economic future. This may be unrealistic, given the changes at RBS and its gradual return to the private sector in recent years, with the latest sale of shares in June making it even harder for Labour to take control if in government.

But Labour does have a point, and find unusual favour in the form of the Bank of England’s chief economist. Although not referring to Labour’s plans, Andy Haldane used a speech last month to point to the network of regional banks in Germany, known as the Sparkassen, as one way the German economy is better suited for developing its intangible economy. Labour’s regional network of banks would be similar in design.

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There are also institutions dedicated to the better diffusion of new ideas into the business community.

The Fraunhofer research societies help thousands of companies each year to develop new ideas. The same task is carried out by the Steinbeis Foundation, which helps transfer academic findings into the field of business. Some of this German thinking would help Britain progress. Haldane points to them both as ways to improve UKproductivity, which has been lingering in the doldrums and delaying wage growth since the financial crisis.

The UK has many things in its favour. English laws protecting intellectual property rights are among the most renowned in the world, encouraging innovation. The government’s industrial strategy is also providing greater funding for infrastructure, skills and training, while also spending more public money on research and development. But not enough is being done. Business leaders are desperate for a greater vision.

Government ministers may be cautious about the idea of picking winners, but they ought to remember this is really about picking the winning economic model for the future. Do the Conservatives and the banks want to be on the side of Potter, or impeding progress?