**1. Introduction**

Propelled by developments of industrial revolution 4.0, nations are gearing towards a knowledge-intensive economy. Therefore, optimism towards scientific knowledge and digital-based innovation to drive economic growth is on the rise. However, the roles of indigenous peoples' place-based knowledge, skills, and experiences have largely been overlooked in the expansion of the digital-based framework of technological innovation. This is due to a lack of understanding of what constitutes indigenous knowledge - indigenous perspectives, models of representation, and their ways of knowing. In fact, because of the appearance of incommensurables between the two types of knowledge, in their encounters with each other, indigenous knowledge is often sidelined. This is despite for the untold number of years indigenous knowledge has helped indigenous communities around the globe to stay resilient in the face of complex challenges and diverse adversities. Drawing on two decades of community-university partnerships between Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and five different rural indigenous communities in the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah on the island of Borneo and four remote Orang Asli communities in Peninsular Malaysia, this paper highlights the need to adopt a balanced indigenous worldview in order to ensure that traditional knowledge remains intact in their encounters with other knowledge systems. This paper addresses this concern through a socio-technical system framework, which is a balanced ecosystem whereby technology is embedded and woven, rather than externally imposed, into a social system for a balanced human-machine interaction and the integration of scientific exploratory models in solving complex problems. This requires a

careful co-envisioned and co-designed framework in a participatory manner that benefits the symbiosis between people, the ecosystem, and the environment.

The next section of the chapter provides a brief overview of indigenous knowledge; that is its characteristics and its increased importance in the development agenda framework at different levels: international, national, and communities. It then highlights an emerging barrier between indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge due to the appearance of incommensurables between the two types of knowledge. The chapter then offers case studies to highlight what are the possibilities of the weaving of these two kinds of knowledge through a socio-technical innovation system. This is followed by a discussion and conclusion to the chapter. It concludes that a socio-technical innovation model, which is a balanced ecosystem where technology is embedded into a social system as an integral knowledge weaving, provides a useful system framework to contextualize indigenous knowledge within contemporary problem-solving scenarios.
