Walmart Is Launching A Tech Incubator In Silicon Valley

Walmart wants to drastically speed up its development of retail tech. To do that, the discount retailer announced on Monday it was launching Store No 8, an innovation cluster whose entrepreneurs will be free from the diktats of its Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters and Wall Street’s short attention span, to develop the retail tech Walmart needs in order to modernize over the next five to ten years. And, more crucially, the tech is aimed at helping it fight back against rivals like Amazon.com. Store No 8 will be located in Silicon Valley and will house startups wholly owned by Walmart but run independently. It’s the latest manifestation of the new, dynamic culture Walmart is looking to instill into its e-commerce strategy under the leadership of Marc Lore, whose Jet.com online store Walmart bought last year for $3 billion. “There’s not a focus just on today, they can actually think bigger,” Lore said at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. “It’s ring-fenced from the organization so they can just run fast.” Read more at Fortune.