Abstract: In recent years, sustainable business models have become an important topic in the field of corporate management research. As the major player in the industry, how incumbent firms achieve sustainable business models has become a core question in the business model innovation research. From the dual process perspective, this paper takes Shaanxi Blower Group as an example to conduct a longitudinal case study and reveals how dual cognitive processes influence incumbents’ building of sustainable business models and how incumbents’ sustainable business models evolve. The study finds that: (1) Analytical processes are suitable for environments with high turbulence or high complexity, while heuristic processes are suitable for environments with low or high turbulence and complexity. (2) Top managers, through the sequential interaction of analytical processes and heuristic processes, enable the focus on incumbents’ sustainable business models to gradually expand from themselves to users, then to market stakeholders, and ultimately to non-market stakeholders. (3) Incumbents’ sustainable business model evolution has undergone four phases of inactive, reactive, strategic and proactive, and gradually evolved from traditional business model innovation, to socially oriented sustainable business model innovation, to technologically oriented sustainable business model innovation, and finally to organizationally oriented sustainable business model innovation.

Key words: incumbent firms, heuristic processes, analytic processes, sustainable business models