Innoventions (Epcot)
| Innoventions | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | Future World (now World Celebration) |
| Type | Exhibit pavilion |
| Opened | July 1, 1994 |
| Closed | September 7, 2019
|
| Status | Closed |
Innoventions was a walk-through exhibit pavilion at EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Florida, devoted to technological innovation and its practical uses in everyday life. Occupying the two semicircular buildings behind Spaceship Earth at the centre of Future World, it was divided into Innoventions East and Innoventions West, arranged around the Innoventions Plaza and its fountain. The name was a portmanteau of "innovation" and "invention."
History
Innoventions opened on July 1, 1994, replacing CommuniCore, the opening-day pavilion that had occupied the same buildings since October 1, 1982.[1] CommuniCore had closed in January 1994, and its glass-walled exhibit halls were extensively remodelled for the new concept, which was more eclectic and more openly driven by its corporate exhibitors.[2]
For the millennium era the pavilion was refreshed as "Innoventions: The Road to Tomorrow," hosted by the character Tom Morrow 2.0. Exhibits rotated through the 2000s as sponsors came and went — a model that kept the halls current but left them vulnerable when a sponsor departed.
The wind-down was gradual. Most West exhibits closed in 2015, after IBM THINK ended on January 1, 2015, and that building was thereafter used mainly for character greetings. In the East, The Sum of All Thrills and StormStruck closed on September 14, 2016. The last East exhibits closed on September 7, 2019.[3]
Exhibits
Innoventions was not a single ride but a changing collection of sponsored, hands-on exhibits, closer to a permanent trade show than to a conventional attraction. At opening it prominently featured an arcade-style display of Sega home systems, including the Genesis, Sega CD, Game Gear, 32X, Pico, Saturn and later the Dreamcast. Apple Computer exhibited in the East building from September 1994 to January 1998, while IBM was the West building's longest-running presence, with successive exhibits from 1994 to 2009 and the returning THINK exhibit from 2013 to 2015.[4]
Later anchor exhibits included Test the Limits Lab, where guests watched consumer products being stress-tested; StormStruck, which simulated a severe storm to teach home safety; Habit Heroes, on healthy habits; and Colortopia, presented by Glidden from November 2015, which explored colour through three interactive rooms. The pavilion's only true ride was The Sum of All Thrills, presented by Raytheon, which opened on October 14, 2009. Guests designed a roller coaster, bobsled or jet ride on a touchscreen table and then rode their creation in a simulator mounted on a large KUKA robotic arm. It closed on September 14, 2016.
Closure and legacy
Innoventions closed as part of the multi-year transformation that replaced Future World with three neighbourhoods: World Celebration, World Discovery and World Nature. The West building was demolished. Its site contributed to the Journey of Water attraction in World Nature and to the new CommuniCore Hall, a flexible festival and exhibit space, and CommuniCore Plaza, an outdoor stage, which opened in World Celebration in June 2024 — a deliberate revival of the CommuniCore name. The East building survived and was remodelled into the Creations Shop, the park's main merchandise location, and Connections, comprising a Starbucks (Connections Café) and the Connections Eatery quick-service restaurant.
Its rotating-sponsor model embodied EPCOT's original idea of industry presenting its own future, but by the 2010s smartphones had made a hall of new gadgets far less novel than in 1994. Its memory is preserved mainly in the CommuniCore names that returned in 2024.