Socio-Tech Entrepreneurship Model: Empowering Tourism MSMEs through Digital Literacy and Collaborative Innovation

Abstract

Tourism micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in rural destinations across Southeast Asia, including village-based tourism areas around Lake Toba, Sumatra, face compounding pressures from post-pandemic recovery and accelerating digital disruption. Existing evidence indicates that the digital divide confronting tourism MSMEs stems not from lack of technology access but from insufficient digital financial literacy and the absence of collaborative institutional networks. This study proposes a Socio-Tech Entrepreneurship Model (STEM) that integrates digital literacy and collaborative innovation as dual mechanisms for strengthening tourism MSME resilience and sustainability. Adopting a qualitative conceptual design grounded in a systematised literature review of nineteen peer-reviewed studies from Indonesian, Latin American, African, and European contexts, the study employs thematic synthesis across three interrelated themes: the digitalisation–innovation–sustainability chain in tourism MSMEs; the role of digital and financial literacy, including QRIS adoption, in ensuring business continuity and performance; and the contribution of collaborative and open innovation ecosystems to post-crisis recovery. The findings reveal that digital literacy and social capital are mutually constitutive, each necessary but insufficient without the other. The proposed model positions these dimensions as integrated inputs, with collaborative innovation as the primary mechanism and MSME resilience, sustainable performance, and destination-level sustainability as the intended outcomes. The study contributes a novel conceptual architecture grounded in dynamic capabilities theory, socio-technical systems thinking, and the tourism innovation ecosystem perspective, with practical implications for policymakers, destination managers, and academic institutions engaged in rural tourism MSME development across emerging economies.