A city is a large and permanent human ecosystem which provides a lot of services and opportunities to its citizens. The rapid urbanization and increasing population have put a lot of strains on city infrastructures and service deliveries. The current urbanization requires strong strategies and innovative planning to modernize the urban life. Many cities are enhancing quality and performance of urban services by being digitalized, intelligent and smarter. The policymakers and city authorities are exploring solutions to deliver the new services in an efficient, responsive and sustainable manner for a large population. The study explores all the possible services among various city dimensions which can make a city smart. The ideas related to smart services are collected from the peer vetted creative crowdsourcing process performed online in India. A directed qualitative conventional content analysis is used to analyze the collected ideas. The unique ideas are clustered into 19 different service categories. The findings suggest multi-dimensional service classification along with required basic infrastructural development. Further, the Smart City Transformation Framework (SCTF) is proposed to help the policy makers, urban developers, government officials and service providers in terms of understanding and to draw more insights from the suggested smart solutions for development of smart cities. There are four key areas (Planning, Physical infrastructure, ICT infrastructure and Deploying Smart solutions) discussed in the proposed framework to illustrate the city transformation. The proposed SCTF is supported by literature and examples adopted by various smart cities across the world to illustrate its effectiveness. Moreover, a mind map is designed to illustrate the interrelationships among the collected ideas in an attractive and procedural visualization for city transformation process. •Smart cities approaches can efficiently handle the existing urban issues.•An exhaustive set of smart services have been listed for city improvements.•Smart City Transformation Framework deals with smart city design process.•Mind map represents the interlinkages among the various smart initiatives.