As the industry continues to embrace innovation and evolve, we are confident the leaders of the sector will steer through this obstacle course of regulatory, operational, environmental, investor, cyber and technological challenges to embrace change and turn alleged disruption into opportunity. "We expect that growth will become more innovation-dependent, with success coming to those companies that use innovation, technologies, products, services, processes and business models to gain competitive advantage."

No one can predict the future. But, utilities can and should be actively engaged trying to shape it. As new business challenges continue to impact the sector, it is important that companies adopt a clear point-of-view about the industry’s evolution and position themselves to succeed under a variety of possible scenarios. For 2016, we believe the following six focus areas will likely have a particularly significant impact on the velocity and trajectory of the industry’s evolution.

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