Abstract Technology companies work with governments to increase business opportunities, foster innovation and diversify investment and expertise in smart cities. However, the heightened pace of technological advancements in artificial intelligence, big data analytics, information and communication technologies, the Internet of Things and autonomous systems presents regulatory challenges for inclusive development owing to their inherent uncertainty and unpredictability. To understand how technology companies drive smart city innovation, we ask: How can governments design policies for regulating innovation clusters and networks in inclusive smart cities? We analyse patents collected from PatSnap (a global patent database) and the annual reports of selected technology companies. Our results indicate a heterogeneous and dynamic landscape spanning smart city innovations, digital products, and the geographical location, connections and composition of patent holders. We derive policy implications for dynamic regulatory design, addressing information asymmetry, policy calibration and the development of regulatory sandboxes and living labs for inclusive smart cities. Similar content being viewed by others Acknowledgements This study has been financially supported by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding author Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Additional information Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary information Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the