Participative processes and citizen?s empowering are considered a crucial aspect for social innovation, involving both private and public sectors. Different models of social innovation are beginning to emerge, reflecting a variety of strategies for collaboration and for detecting societal needs. This paper analyzes recent trends in literature on social innovation, considering the interrelationship between citizen participation processes and improvement of quality of life. As far as people's needs represent societal needs, identifying those non well-covered by existing products and services are considered a powerful way for arising social innovations opportunities. In this context, we present a case-study of social innovation focused on the gap between elderly people needs and the creation of business opportunities throughout a living-lab initiative. It constitutes a case of collaborative innovation between users and producers using an ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) platform as instrument to detect and answer user expectations, gather people needs, identifying social innovation opportunities and assisting decision-making processes of local governance.