It is important to recall that the demand side’s active participation in the evaluation and financing of new products and services is absolutely essential to the Schumpeter model of “creative destruction.” The alert, fast judgment of individual consumers as to the value of a new product or service is what fuels the growth of the new (good), relative to the old (bad). This process is particularly effective because it not only provides for the growth of the new (with new purchases and the promise of even more in the future), but also because it denies resources to the old (as consumers abandon those they used to support). This twin effect tends to produce very rapid changes in the market share of the new versus the old. But it is also important to recall that the effective demand side for national educational systems is not principally individual consumers with money to spend on educational services they value in their own terms. National educational systems typically include that kind of demand as a portion of the overall aggregate demand for education. National educational systems also include the kind of demand that comes from voluntary third party payers who pay for the provision of educational services through endowments, or a continuous flow charitable support to a school, or contributions to scholarship funds. But in most national systems, the largest amount of funding comes from government tax revenues. And, even those systems that are supported by consumer purchases or charitable contributions are often regulated by the government to ensure that the schools deliver a service consistent with national goals for education. Since the practical power to define value in educational performance comes from those who make decisions to financially support (buy!) services from particular educational suppliers, the particular evaluative criteria used to distinguish good educational performance from less good lies with those who have the most money to buy, and the most authority to regulate, the production of educational goods and services. For the most part, that is the government (ideally acting as an agent for society as a whole.) The implication is that the capacity of the educational system not only to recognize increased value in educational activities, but also to scale the more valuable activities up and deny resources to the old has to lie with government (as it is influenced by the wider public). It is here that the concerns about supplier capture become most important. If current suppliers of educational services – whether government agencies, voluntary sector enterprises, or commercial enterprises – can shape government financing and regulation to their particular ideas of creating public value in education, they can succeed in dominating the supply, and therefore the level and distribution, of educational services, and the impact that education has on the society. In order for the demand side to play its important role in encouraging system learning and improved performance, it has to be a reliable arbiter of the public value produced by the system as a whole, and one that can quickly and reliably assess the micro and macro value of any particular innovation that emerges in the field either as a result of natural innovation, or strategic judgments made about the particular areas in which innovation would be particularly valuable, and the kinds of innovations that seemed most promising. If the demand side is not aligned with the sources of financing and authorization that are the largest forces shaping the operations of the supply side, then there is no guarantee that the innovations being developed will create a gale of creative destruction. It might, as an alternative, simply create idiot winds that sweep across the landscape with destructive rather than construction impact.