appealing in that it seems futuristic, and it aligns with the Silicon Valley technological solution approach.
Although Thrun, Koller and Ng all worked at Stanford, and so could thus be seen as part of the establishment, Thrun in particular has been cast as the education outsider. In order to satisfy this need for an external party coming to the aid of the sector, the Khan Academy's founder, Sal Khan, has often been proposed as the godfather of MOOCs (High 2013).
Another important aspect that appeals to Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and journalists alike is that of disruption. This comes from Clayton Christensen’s influential 1997 work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which analysed how digital technology in particular could create new markets which disrupted existing ones. Christensen made the distinction between sustaining technologies, which help improve an existing market, and disruptive ones, which establish a new market. Digital cameras can be seen as disruptive to the traditional camera market, while improved memory and features of digital cameras are sustaining.
It is a term that has been applied much more broadly than its original concept, to the point where it is almost meaningless and rarely critically evaluated. Dvorak (2004) complains that it is essentially meaningless, stating that 'There is no such thing as a disruptive technology. There are inventions and new ideas, many of which fail while others succeed. That's it.' There remains however a disruption obsession inherent in the Silicon Valley narrative. As Watters (2013) argues, disruption has become somewhat akin to a cultural myth amongst Silicon Valley:
When I say then, that 'disruptive innovation' is one of the great myths of the contemporary business world, particularly of the tech industry, I don’t mean by 'myth' that Clayton Christensen's explanation of changes to
