**9. Findings and discussion**

The cases above suggest that any scientific knowledge and technological innovation as drivers either to promote knowledge-based products and services or to create values and culture of life-long learning amongst indigenous communities require careful co-envisioned and co-designed in a participatory manner. The context of the innovation has to adopt a knowledge-based inquiry and a value-creation activity that benefits the symbiosis between people, ecosystem, and environment. It is imperative to ensure that the intervention of modern technology must not erode knowledge processes related to this symbiotic relationship.

This is important to bear in mind as indigenous communities are under increasing pressure to adapt to global knowledge. In their encounter with scientific knowledge, the values of their indigenous cultural knowledge are often in a disadvantageous position and being undermined. This is in spite of the increased global recognition of indigenous communities' knowledge not only to help indigenous communities to be resilient, live sustainably in the face of challenges such as climate change, but also to maintain global cultural diversity and biological diversity.

For the interdiscplinarian team from UNIMAS, who values sound methodological research, reframing the methodology towards participative, transcultural dialogs provide a framework to adopt a balanced indigenous worldview leading to protocols that inculcate the recognition of the coexistence of multiple worldviews and knowledge systems. Compare to a purely systemic approach in modeling community sustainability, the groundbreaking methodological model led to the development of a socio-technical technical systems innovation. As illustrated in **Figures 4** and **5** this can lead to the harnessing of indigenous knowledge and worldviews to design indigenous innovation models. It involved the repurposing of technologies by aligning them to cultural protocols and norms and social practices to cultivate symbiotic relationships with people, the environment, and nature. The process-oriented model (**Figure 2**) allows for a balanced human-machine interaction and the integration of scientific exploratory models in solving complex problems.

### *Digital Socio-Technical Innovation and Indigenous Knowledge DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101861*

**Figure 4.**

*eToro – Innovation ecosystem. Source: Adapted from [26, 27].*

**Figure 5.** *MOOCs for community sustainability channels.*

Harnessing their oral-based indigenous knowledge expressions, the indigenous single mothers of the Kelabit community participated in producing MOOC modules with the reshaped model. This is to enable life-long learning for the indigenous women and their grandchildren through their community sustainability channels (**Figure 5**).

Meanwhile, the e-Toro innovation system highlights indigenous place-based structured knowledge. Through the Toro journey as an activity-based knowledge sharing and mentoring journey, tacit indigenous knowledge is demonstrated and observed through carefully selected oral stories in which instruction and values are embedded. In **Figure 3**, the designated community knowledge holder, a Penan elder transmits the value of knowing the forest: If you do not know your origin [Forest], you are not a Penan.

As depicted in case studies, the inherent layers and dimensions of societal structure have to be preserved in the co-design efforts, to integrate within an encompassing framework that stakeholders can relate to and contribute to in a meaningful way. Connections between all living things relates to an over-arching principle of "unity in diversity" that has captured (as in both case studies) in the simplistic modeling terms through life-illustrations and analogical models of co-creation.
