Validity of annual report assertions about innovativeness: an empirical investigation

Over the last few decades, annual reports have been content-analyzed to measure various organizational phenomena. These studies assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that Annual Report Text (ART) assertions are accurate representations of the firm and its managers. This assumption diverges from a common suspicion that corporate managers use their ART as a public relations tool. To date, only three ART validity studies have been occasioned and the results are mixed and dated. In this study, the ARTs of 100 randomly selected Fortune 500 and Service 500 firms were content-analyzed to test the relationship between ART assertions about firm innovativeness and two external measures of firm innovativeness. The results strongly indicate that ART assertions about innovativeness are valid.