Abstract: With the development of Internet economy and the arrival of big data era, business model innovation, as a research focus, has become more and more important to the development of enterprises. Through literature review, it is found that there are significant differences in the researches on innovation process of business model, and no consistent theoretical model has been obtained. According to the previous researches, applying the grounded theory, the paper builds the stage model of process of business model innovation and analyze sits related mechanism by studying 4 enterprises of business model innovation in China, including Alibaba, Red Collar, MI and Focus Media. The main conclusions include:(1) The innovation process of business model includes the creative period of business model, the application period of business model, and the lean period of business model; (2) The creative period of business model includes finding business opportunities and idea generation, the application period of business model includes creative advocacy and creative implementation, the lean period of business model is the lean process of business model, which is reflected in the constant revision and improvement of the new business model; (3) In general, business model innovation is a process of constant revision, improvement, and gradual evolution, in which each stage is closely related to and interacts with each other. Finally, the paper proposes some suggestions for the business model innovation in enterprises.

Key words: business model innovation, grounded theory, stage model of process, model construction