The IT industry is characterized by rapid development of technology and therefore demands external financial capital to drive the research and development. Transparent communication of innovation in the annual report is of importance for innovative companies to achieve influx of external capital from investors. Due to strong competition companies is faced with the dilemma of how much information to reveal. Reveling more can benefit the competitors; reveling less can deter investors due to information asymmetry. The annual report is one of the most important channels for companies to communicate information on innovation.The purpose of this study is to increase understanding of communication on innovation in external information, in this case the annual report among companies with high and low barriers against imitation, to reduce information asymmetry. This is done through: (1) Describing the communication, (2) identifying and analyzing the emphasis and characteristics of the information, (3) develop a model of information signaling to handle information asymmetry. To address the purpose a case study has been conducted on twenty-two European IT companies. The case study was conducted through a discourse analysis and content analysis of the annual reports of the year 2012 for each company. Based on the annual reports signals were identified and grouped into the categories process innovation and product innovation, to show how the communication has occurred. This study has also examined the nature of the signal (past, present and future) to show how innovative publicly traded companies emphasize innovation information in the annual reports.Our study shows that extent of companies innovation reporting is varying, both for companies with high barriers against imitation and those with low barriers. The surveyed companies with high barriers against imitation appear to report more information, but the difference may not statistically demonstrate. IT-companies tend to communicate mostly information regarding process innovation and the information is mostly historically orientated.