With the constant development of market demands, business model innovation has become an important way for enterprises to create value and enhance competitiveness, which is conducive to the sustainable development of enterprises. However, enterprises are prone to form "inertia", which is manifested as "take things as they are" or "path dependence". According to the path-dependence theory, once an enterprise chooses the development path of a certain business model, it will become dependent on it, and make limited relevant decisions. In reality, large traditional retail enterprises such as Carrefour and Metro have failed to innovate their business models in a timely manner as changes in the Chinese retail market occur but adhered to their original concepts and models, which leads to a gradual withdrawal from the Chinese market. Therefore, how to carry out business model innovation is an urgent problem to be solved when an organization is in a state of inertia.
   Based on this, this paper takes the traditional retail enterprises as samples and uses the grounded theory method to explore the process of business model innovation in the inert atmosphere. In this study, data is obtained from various channels, and primary data and secondary data is combined to increase the richness of data. Firstly, relevant data are labeled, conceptualized and categorized by open coding to identify the initial category. Then the main category is obtained by using spindle coding. Finally, through selective coding, the relationship structure between main categories is established and the core categories are further identified, so as to form a story line according to the connections among categories, and finally the business model innovation process model of the organization under the inert atmosphere is constructed.
   This paper draws the following conclusions: (1) Environmental pressure urges organizations to reflect on existing business models, and then take measures to carry out business model innovation. (2) The effective combination of initiative forgetting, learning and borrowing in knowledge construction is more conducive for organizations to carry out business model innovation in an inert atmosphere. Firstly, organizations can forget the old norms, systems and performance standards through initiative forgetting, so as to reduce their dependence on the original business model. Secondly, organizations should change the internal innovation atmosphere through learning and actively explore and optimize the new business model. Finally, developing new business models requires borrowing existing organizational resources to make appropriate connections between the old and new business models. (3) Organizations network embedding also has an important influence on the knowledge construction process of business model. Relationship embedding enables organizations to acquire explicit and implicit knowledge through information sharing, mutual trust and commitment. Structural embedding reflects the position of organizations in the network, and affects the heterogeneity of organizations′ acquisition of business model innovation knowledge. (4) On the basis of knowledge construction, enhancing the improvisation ability of the organization is conducive to improving the immediacy and creativity of business model innovation, so as to better weaken organizational inertia and promote business model innovation.
    The theoretical and practical significance of the paper lies in: (1) Current research on the influencing factors of business model innovation rarely discusses the obstacles to innovation, and lacks enough attention to the inert characteristics of organizations in business model innovation. This paper makes a systematic analysis of how do organizations carry out business model innovation in an inert atmosphere, so as to enrich relevant research; (2) This paper reveals the role of environmental pressure, organizational reflection, knowledge construction, network embedding and organizational improvisation in the transformation process from inertia to business model innovation, which provides theoretical reference for enhancing the flexibility of business model innovation and helps guide the practice of business model innovation.