What are the key barriers for increased automation in the seafood industry?

Master's thesis in BusinessAbstract This thesis aims to examine and explain the key barriers to increased use of automation in the Norwegian seafood industry. Increased use of automation is empowering technologies in the seafood industry where the ambition is to expand product quality, enhance working environment, improve hygiene criterions, bring down production cost and reduce food waste. Even though automation augments opportunities to increase productivity, efficiency and quality, the degree of automation is still low in the seafood industry. The seafood industry uses some technologies for its advantages, but there is still potential for more. To understand these technologies better it is essential to see how firms wants to innovate and plan to tackle difficulties to come. There are different barriers preventing firms to fully commit to enhance the implementation of automation in their daily business activities. The analysis is based on a dataset focusing on firms in the seafood industry. By using a logit regression model to investigate the barriers; lack of internal funds, lack of external funds, lack of qualified personnel, difficulties to get public support, lack of external partners, uncertain demand for innovation ideas and too high competition at the market. Furthermore, its influence on four different innovation outcomes. Which is total product innovation, radical product innovation, total process innovation, and radical process innovation. The empirical literature identifies the most common barriers as; high costs, lack of financial resources, lack of qualified personnel and the ability for a firm to adapt to new technologies as these are major obstacles preventing firms to innovate. The overall result show that there are not any key barriers preventing firms in the Norwegian seafood industry to innovate. None of the barriers shows a significant value with a decreased likelihood of innovating