Watching "Silicon Valley" for Creativity Techniques

After I had watched some pitching in action with my Shark Tank experiment, I starting think about the other components of our class--namely, the 10 Creativity Techniques--and whether or not I might find any of those represented in popular culture. It wasn't long before I realized that a brand new show had aired this spring that was all about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and was one that I had briefly wrote about in a previous blog post: namely, HBO's comedy series Silicon Valley. 

I didn't know much about the show, other than that it was a comedy, it was set in the world of tech startups, and it starred a bunch of quite funny comedians. For those unfamiliar, here is the trailer:

My plan was to watch the first 2 episodes (30 minutes each) and take note of which of the 10 creativity techniques the characters implemented and write about them for a blog post. The first part went off without a hitch...but when it came to write about the creativity techniques I was stumped, simply because in a show set in Silicon Valley about a number of companies (both startups and Google-esque tech giants), there was absolutely zero brainstorming shown onscreen in the first two episodes.

I had initially thought that a show like Silicon Valley, which takes place entirely in the so-called "innovation industry," would be chock-full of fictionalized brainstorming, or scenes in which the characters engage in activities that would at least be tangentially related to any number of the creativity techniques we experimented with in class. That said, I'm still happy that I watched the show and thought it was useful to watch and think about in the context of studying and thinking about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship for this class.

One area of research that I have pursued during my time in the Simmons GCS program, and one that I hope to continue to work in as a doctoral student, is television and popular culture. I think that it is important to examine how our culture reacts to, records, and reinterprets social movements and cultural epochs, with television shows being a prime example of a living text that does just that. Silicon Valley is a show that appears to be reflecting, satirizing, and even challenging this current moment in which innovation is seen as something that happens when socially hapless "nerds" singularly devote their time and energy to developing websites and apps in order to cash in and attempt to claim the title of the world's youngest billionaire.

As we read about in The Art of Innovation, not only is this decidedly not how innovation happens, that is also not even why people are creative and/or innovative. Although I have only watched 2 episodes, Silicon Valley also seems to be suggesting that innovation, creativity, and even entrepreneurship is not just about the bottom line and using buzzwords. The one character that seems to embody these stereotypes has been set up as the series antagonist: Gavin Belson (played by Matt Ross) is the CEO of Hooli, and in the pilot offers series protagonist Richard (Thomas Middlemarch) $10 million for his startup, Pied Piper. Richard ultimately rejects the offer in favor of building up Pied Piper himself with the help of Silicon Valley guru and investor Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch), demonstrating that although the show doesn't quite show (at least not in its first hour) the process of brainstorming as we've come to understand it in class, it at least exhibits the same ethos about how and why we innovate.