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Urbanization is globally rampant; in developing countries such as India, it is driven in a phenomenal pace by an aspiring, young society and ambitious state policies to achieve a competitive space in global economy. "Smart cities" is a new-age term coined specifically to control, monitor, measure, and evaluate our urban growth, in a way to understand how conducive are our cities for running businesses. Global borders are diminishing, and world-wide economies compete on multiple dimensions in a level playing field to participate and prosper in global markets. Cities are centers of economic activities, and the economic growth of a country largely depends on safe and supportive cities. Therefore, the need for smart cities is not difficult to establish.The more difficult questions are, "do we really know what a smart city is?" or "what are the elements that go into making an existing city smart?" Such questions are pertinent and timely. This paper attempts to answer these questions in a descriptive manner based on theoretical and empirical observations. We adopt an integrative approach of design conceptualization, policy building, and framework development, substantiated using an Indian city, namely, Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh State as an illustrative case.

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Purpose New services design and development are difficult to plan, execute, measure and evaluate. Particularly, new services that are capital-intensive and involve a long gestation and development time are considered extremely risky. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a list of innovative practices in various managerial aspects in designing, planning and development of a large scale infrastructure intensive public transportation service. A contemporary new public transportation service development is discussed as evidence of proven and benchmarked criteria. Design/methodology/approach This is a technical paper, where theoretical foundations of best practices in new service development project are discussed and supported by practice-based evidences from a real-life urban transportation project. A case study approach is adopted with secondary data. Findings Worldwide during and after economic recession of 2008, several projects were stalled or abandoned. The inference through this work is that through efficient management practices, a large capital-intensive new service development project can be made successful even during a turbulent economy in a region marred by more challenges than elsewhere. Practical implications Several issues in large scale services development, such as urban transportation are domain specific. Some of the issues faced in urban transportation are common to several Gulf countries; therefore the policy guidelines, managerial practices and development strategies reported in this paper can be replicated in many of them. The commercial impact of the service project is a significant drive towards fuel conservation and to save huge amounts of productive time. Social implications Public transportation with a high quality of networked service improves the quality of life to a large extent. Unless certain measurable demands are not met, an affluent society is less likely to endorse public transportation. In addition, endorsement of public transportation is been promoted in several parts of the world as a drive towards a green, energy efficient, low-carbon emission and sustainable environment. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, new services planning and development is a key operations management topic, on which very little is written about. Particularly no other paper has presented a real-world large scale infrastructure intensive project development to this detail, and along with a theoretical background to benchmark performance and development practices.