Since the industrial revolution, technology has contributed to rapid socioeconomic development, but has also caused a sharp deterioration of the ecological environment. Thus, corporate green innovation strategy has been rising at the right time to cope with the current deteriorating ecological environment. It is an urgent task nowadays to strengthen the guidance and control of enterprises, and to make enterprises shift to green production. Although the previous literature abroad has explored the influencing factors of green innovation strategy, researchers are constrained to their specific subject areas so there is no one theoretical framework that is widely accepted among scholars by far. Furthermore, the research findings before are also in dispute, sometimes even contradictory, especially lacking in-depth study of the mechanism of factors influencing the green innovation strategy. From the micro perspective, this paper probes into the key elements that affect the implementation of green innovation strategy and their impacting mechanisms, and multiple case studies in grounded theory has been employed to explore the drivers of green innovation strategy, which has used a dozen of typical enterprises in heavy polluting industries as objects. Through in-depth interviews, open coding, axial coding and selective coding processes, we have identified the core areas of green innovation strategy drivers as well as the expected economic benefits, redundant resources and stakeholder pressure to be the three main areas, based on which a driving factor model of green innovation strategy has been proposed. According to the results of case studies, expected economic benefits, redundant resources and stakeholder pressure are three major factors affecting green innovation strategies. The results show that expected economic benefits, redundant resources and stakeholder pressure all have significant effects on green innovation strategy. The expected economic benefits is an inner driver of green innovation strategy, influencing corporate behavior through managers' assessment of the benefits of green innovation strategy|redundant resources is an internal situational condition of implementing green innovation strategy, being the factor that relates to the ability of the starting and operating of green innovation strategy|stakeholder pressure is the external situational factor and strengthening factor that has an impact on the implementation of green innovation strategy, reflecting the external norms imposed on the corporate green innovation strategy. In addition, this two situational variables, redundant resources and stakeholder pressure, affect the intensity and direction of the relationship between expected economic benefits and green innovation strategy. When the situational variables are weak, green innovation strategy is mainly affected by the expected economic benefits|when the impact of situational factors is very significant, it is more likely that green innovation strategy will be adopted. This study provides policy thinking and implementation for the government to develop regulatory policies of promoting green innovation strategy. The government can urge enterprises to adopt green innovation strategy by raising the awareness of green innovation, rational use of the role of stakeholders as well as reducing the cost of implementing green innovation strategy.