**8. eToro: innovation ecosystem**

This research began in 2007 amongst the indigenous Penan community in Long Lamai, Sarawak. Nomadic in the recent past, they still depend on the forest for their livelihood. Through a trans-disciplinary, participatory approach, a long-standing partnership has evolved to closely mirror indigenous practices in knowledge sharing [23–25].

The socio-technical model approach as a knowledge-sharing networks started with the acknowledgment of the tremendous knowledge repository possessed by the community elders and which are implicitly locked in traditional practices. In order to understand their traditional knowledge system, the team adopted a visual charting approach to map the close link between the community laws, nature, the rainforest, social practices, language, culture and heritage, and customary practices and rituals.

The deep connection between the land, locale, and community began to unravel through a family-based activity known as the Toro journey. As an intimate joint activity of a Penan family, Toro is an activity-based knowledge sharing and mentoring journey, which is usually undertaken within a period of a week solely for hunting, to collect forest resources, and also to groom future guardians of the forest (**Figure 3**). This is where plant knowledge related to social beliefs and for daily use is shared and transmitted. This includes knowledge of medicinal plant use and the meanings of different landscapes in their environment. As a forest-journey interactions and knowledge exchanges, the Toro journey provided snapshots on models of multidimensional layers of inherent indigenous wisdom.

**Figure 3.** *Penan elder: If you do not know your origin [Forest], you are not a Penan.*

There is a concern that with the intervention of modern technology through the telecentre, the knowledge related to this symbiotic relationship might erode. But, the blended socio-technical model approach has enabled the rural community's 'knowledge-rich scholars' to co-create technological solutions and involves the community to decide on the design of the system thereby allowing a snaturalized participation and involvement in collaboratively recording indigenous knowledge. A botanical indigenous knowledge base was thereby developed via a coordinated co-creation method where the elders worked closely with rural youths in documenting local knowledge. The knowledge elicitation activities benefitted fully from the community's integral knowledge management capability without over-looking implicitly indigenous values.

What is clear is that compared to a purely systemic approach in modeling community sustainability, the approach has revealed directions for unlocking intangible benefits by truly harnessing the previously untapped cultural heritage and implicitly held knowledge resources. Moreover, through the approach a multilevel decision-making process involving the community players in a variety of roles such as knowledge extraction system and systems interface co-designers, a co-constructed socio-technical innovation in an ecosystem of the equal partnership was produced (**Figure 2**). The drive of the spirited community that believed in the utmost need to conserve a symbiotic relationship with nature and the forest has been the impetus in empowering a values-based socio-technical innovation.
