The research by AT&T reveals that many firms are investing a larger percentage of their ICT budgets in new technology and predict those investments will grow more quickly.
The probability of becoming highly competitive can double from 35%-74% for firms that have strong business resources and invest in new technology.
New technologies can help increase productivity and efficiency with the right infrastructure.
"Increasing productivity is one of the primary challenges facing European companies today," said Andrew Edison, EMEA regional vice president for AT&T. "New technologies like cloud offer great opportunities to do this, which some high performers are demonstrating. However, simply adopting the newest technologies is not the answer, and is in fact a great risk.
"They must sit on top of mature, standardised platforms. Being agile and competitive doesn’t mean being the quickest, it means always being able to be quick. The secret is a mature platform and avoiding the creation of ‘infrastructure spaghetti’ in the rush to adopt the latest tools."
New technology investments in Europe are predicted to accelerate over the next two years.
The data shows that investment in mobility will increase to 20%, cloud based services to 23% and collaboration tools will rise slightly from 16% to 17%.
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The research suggests that new technology investments are critical for global competition but European companies are currently spending less in this area.
European policy makers can help businesses mature their digital platforms by creating the right regulatory environment to facilitate storage and data flow.
"To emerge from economic crisis, companies and governments need to identify how technology can be most productive; and how it can best help Europe compete in a global race," said Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission.
"The fact is we need to fully understand what emerging technologies mean for performance; and how to ensure that they bring most return for your euro. At the moment, it is more important than ever to get the most out of investment: whether public or private. So we need not just to make judicious decisions about new technologies, but also to build the environment where investment has the best chance of success."
