Mushroom clothing, lab-based meat and flying taxis: Predictions we got right — and wrong — in our Big Ideas for 2023

Who could have predicted a year ago that there would be historic levels of union activity, plant-based fabrics would go mainstream or that companies would rush to add menopause benefits to their wellness offerings?

Well, as it turns out, we did.?

Every fall, LinkedIn News asks experts around the world to weigh in with their boldest predictions for the coming year — and 12 months ago, we compiled 41 of these Big Ideas that we expected to reshape the world in 2023. Our editors and industry leaders forecast a future where innovative technologies would fight climate change, companies would confront a growing labor movement and investors would gravitate to the tried-and-true rather than splashy bets.?

Many of those ideas proved to be prescient. To highlight just a few:

• Retailers H&M and Lululemon both introduced apparel made with plant-based fabrics after LinkedIn News editor Siobhan Morrin said we’d be “wearing mushrooms and seaweed” this year.?
• The number of U.S. layoffs in 2023 were below economist expectations — and this past summer even saw the first year-over-year decline in job losses — an insightful prediction from LinkedIn editor Andrew Seaman that could have easily gone the other way.
• The movement to extract carbon from the air got a $1.2 billion investment from the Biden Administration in August, furthering an effort that LinkedIn News editor Melvin Captein argued would gain steam.?

In total, we hit the mark on 61% of our 41 Big Ideas last year, while we missed on 19.5%. The rest fell into the squishy middle — the cases in which we were half-right or there wasn’t enough evidence one way or another.??

Sometimes, we were able to spot the glimmer of a trend and determine that it had staying power. Several months after LinkedIn editor Manas Pratap Singh predicted that money would rush into women’s sports, The Washington Post called female athletes “the sports world’s growth stocks ,” pointing to the 2 billion viewers of the 2023 Women’s World Cup (double the number from 2019) and the $53 million investment to place a National Women’s Soccer League team in San Francisco.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in June recommended that adults ages 19-64 get regular anxiety screenings as part of their annual exams – responding to the growing call for mental health screenings that Shairi Turner, MD, MPH , chief health officer at Crisis Text Line, expected to ramp up this year.?

In line with LinkedIn editor Marty McCarthy 's prediction, lab-based meat companies received regulatory approval to start or expand sales in two countries: the United States, which signed off on lab-cultured meat from Upside Meat and Good Meat, and Singapore, which has allowed lab-cultured meat since 2020 but will now permit Good Meat to also sell serum-free meat . (Australia is also reviewing an application that would allow the sale of lab-cultured meat as early as next year.)?

But we didn’t always get it right, as our scorecard shows. It was especially tough to forecast which tech innovations would make it to market.?

Take greentech. Our editors made some good calls, but other predictions missed the mark. Last year, we argued that minerals mined from the deep sea would help power billions of electric vehicles. But one of the leading players in this effort, The Metals Company, faced a setback in its bid to mine a swath of the Pacific Ocean for polymetallic nodules. The company has been facing concerns about the unintended impact of deep sea mining. And a regulatory framework has yet to be developed for this kind of work – and won’t be ready before next year. In the meantime, investors might jump ship before that happens, with shares of The Metals Company plunging as low as $0.51 earlier this year on the news that its application for deep-sea mining can’t be submitted quite yet.

We’ll also have to keep waiting for flying taxis and for more companies to start doing significant business in the metaverse. Social media stalwarts also maintained their ground — despite our prediction otherwise — while upstarts like BeReal struggled to hold the attention of Gen Z, even as we expected bigger things from these smaller players.

The tech industry wasn’t the only place where we found it difficult to see around the bend. We have found it notoriously challenging over the years to predict the next recession, and this year was no exception (not that we’re rooting for one.) Very few companies also seem to be venturing into cryptocurrencies – with Ferrari the only example we could find of a brand that made the decision this year to accept the volatile tokens as payment.?

We fared a little bit better on labor and housing trends — although sometimes the tea leaves gave us mixed signals.?

Case in point: 2023 seemed to be a banner year for collective bargaining, and the number of workers who walked off the job in the first nine months of the year was three times higher than in 2022 and 10x higher than 2021. In fact, 2023 may well be the hottest year for labor activity in four decades – with strikes coming from the United Auto Workers, the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America and many, many hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente (the largest healthcare strike in history).?

But it’s too soon to tell what effect those actions will have on union membership, which fell to 10.1% of wage and salary workers in 2022, the lowest percentage on record . On the other hand, unionization is reaching record levels in some professions – like among doctors-in-training , most notably – where they were once less common. This past year even saw the first-ever physicians strike, which The New York Times described as “relatively small … but heavy on symbolism ,” coming at a hospital that was ground zero for COVID-19 cases during the spring of 2020.

And while we were correct that climate change would drive some middle- and lower-income homeowners away from disaster-prone coastal areas, the trend wasn’t nationwide . And in fact, the opposite was true in some regions – affordability was a driving factor among people who moved to flood- or fire-prone areas.

What’s ahead for this year? It’s anyone’s guess right now. But we tried anyway: You can check out this year’s Big Ideas on December 6 — it’s bold and audacious, just like the year before. How many do you think we’ll get right?

In the meantime, let us know in the comments what surprised you in 2023 — and what was utterly predictable.

See you next year!

-Written by Beth Kutscher