Abstract:With the development of the digital economy, digitization has become the direction of traditional industries. As the significant element in the development of the current digital economy, big data can drive the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, bring positive effects to the development of traditional industries, and solve the problems of high cost with low informatization of traditional industries. Through the theoretical research on big data, in the respect of big data value chain, the value connotation of big data is explored, and it will be clear that big data can drive the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries through value creation. In the meantime, according to the three essential elements of the big data value chain, namely the data quality and quantity, data analysis and innovative thinking, the transformation and upgrading paths for traditional industries driven by big data are proposed respectively, i.e., the data-driven path, the capability-building path and the thinking dual-way path. Then, relevant recommendations on policies are proposed for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries.