Self-guided tour of 1819 Innovation Hub now available

The 1819 Innovation Hub, the nerve center of the Cincinnati Innovation District, is now offering a self-guided tour. The tour takes visitors through four floors and has individual nine stops. 

Easily accessible

The tour is available to any visitor of the 1819 during office hours. Visitors are greeted at the main entrance with a sign containing a QR code, where they can use a personal device to scan and access the tour. 

Throughout the building, QR codes are posted on each floor and stop of the tour. This allows visitors to start the tour wherever is most convenient to them. When designing the tour, 1819 staff placed an importance on making it widely accessible.  

“In designing the flow of the experience, we needed to recognize that some people will enter the upper floors from two locations – the elevators or the stairs – so we had to omit a step-by-step tour program and more ‘go to the next stop’. The stops are identified by signage with applicable QR codes,” explained Patty Moser, director of CID experience events. 

Overview of tour 

Starting off on the ground floor atrium, visitors will get an overview of the 1819 and CID. The first two stops on the tour are through the Makerspace and Esports Innovation Lab. 

Visitors will then make their way to the second floor of the hub. There they will find the new Learning Lab as well as the first corporate partner spaces such as Kao, Fifth Third Bank and Great American Insurance Company. Visitors will also see offices for the UC Venture Lab, where 255 entrepreneurial teams enrolled in the pre-accelerator program in the first 21 cohorts from 2018 to early 2023, and offices for UC’s Technology Transfer team. 

Continuing up, the third floor provides spaces for even more corporate partners and organizations. Visitors will be exposed to two nonprofit partnerships on the third floor: Live Well Collaborative and Village Life Outreach Project.

Finishing the tour on the fourth floor, visitors will be guided by the 1819 Innovation Hub team offices and take a deep dive into the building’s rich history as a former Sears, Roebuck & Co. building. The tour concludes by asking guests to engage with the Cincinnati Innovation District by filling out a contact form or following CID social media accounts. 

Story by Max Kemats, 1819 Innovation Hub student worker