In this paper, we present a concept prototype for a socio-technical assistant (s.TAS) as a collaborative problem-solving approach to support the regional development in a selected rural district. The presented concept considers insides from citizen participation as an open government instrument and strongly incorporates collaborative value creation to address regional development issues. The presented approach incorporates citizens and other regional stakeholders (e.g., companies, organizations, associations) as problem-solvers and strongly enables regional stakeholders and the public administration to develop solutions jointly as an ongoing learning process. In this sense, s.TAS addresses participation approaches and elaborates participation to collaboration. For the development of this participatory problem-solving approach, we conducted (1) a broad literature review on participatory approaches and (2) we implemented a qualitative, collaborative research approach with participants from different stakeholder groups. In several workshop rounds, supported by interviews and surveys we developed a concept prototype for the socio-technical assistant s.TAS, which is a technical, smart system, which supports information, communication, participation and collaboration in the selected region.