Fish cracker processing technology acceptance among fish cracker entrepreneurs in the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is one of the entities that play significant role in countries’ development worldwide. SMEs consist of many potential industries including fish cracker industry. Meanwhile, fish cracker processing technology is a tool that is crucial for this industry since it provides many benefits during fish cracker processing. However, there are still lack of study foci on technology application specifically machineries or tools among SMEs, precisely in Malaysia context. Besides that, the fish cracker entrepreneurs also prefer to use traditional practiced during fish cracker processing that affect the quality as well as production performance of the product and the biggest challenges that most of them faced was financial constraints since the technology application required large investment. Accordingly, this current study aims to advance prior works by adapting the integration of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) by including factors of Perceive Ease of Use (PEOU), Perceive Usefulness (PU) and Attitude (AT) in studying the behaviour of fish cracker entrepreneurs towards the acceptance of fish cracker processing technology specifically in Malaysia framework. Particularly, this research was conducted to examine the acceptance level, relationship between technology acceptance constructs and the most influencing factors towards the acceptance of fish cracker processing technology. A data of 300 fish cracker entrepreneurs by using a set of questionnaire was analysed by employing IBM SPSS statistic software which including descriptive analysis, Pearson-correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. The findings indicated that fish cracker entrepreneurs showed low-level of acceptance towards the usage of fish cracker processing technology. Meanwhile, all technology acceptances construct which are PEOU, PU and AT were significantly positive, while, PEOU become the most influencing factor of acceptance of fish cracker processing technology. This study concluded that, most of fish cracker entrepreneurs acknowledge the benefit of fish cracker processing technology in their business and accepted to use the technology if the government and related agency can support and help them in improving the productivity of the product.