Innovation is an essential issue for companies and educational institutes. We have seen that well-known companies came into trouble since they did not innovate in time. They kept their well-established way of operating and adhered to their old-fashioned business models. The main topic of this contribution is to address the question: to what extent can the availability of Big Data support the innovation attempts of companies and educational institutes?We start by mentioning five examples of innovation and relate them to data science and big data. We describe basic concepts and developments. We then formulate six possible classes of obstacles and take into account the use of sensitive data. Finally, we arrive at two conclusions and three recommendations.