WINNERS OF THE 2025 ZeroDX AWARDS ANNOUNCED

For the second year the winners of the ZeroDX Awards have been announced at a major event in Beijing. The Awards celebrate progressive organizations from throughout the world who have put the principles of Zero Distance into practice. Championed by the creator of the awards, the Haier Group, Zero Distance is based on narrowing the gap between producers and users to generate value.

The Awards, presented by the Haier Research Institute, the Business Ecosystem Alliance and MLab, are made in three categories:

Transformational: One of the great organizational challenges is shifting the culture and behaviour of an already existing large entity which may be highly successful. To succeed in changing individual habits, organizational systems, expectations and measures, is an act of true transformation. These awards recognise organizations which are in the process of, or have succeeded in, achieving major progressive transformation.

Benchmark Innovators: Through their vision, values, strength and persistence some organizations successfully forge new standards for the application of progressive management.  They set the standards which others follow. They are the benchmark innovators.

Emergent Excellence: Each change in an organization is significant. It can make a difference to how people behave and how the organization performs. And, more importantly, one change can ignite another and another. An appetite for improvement, a curiosity to do things better and differently, is what marks some organizations apart from the crowd. These are organizations which demonstrate, often repeatedly, the capacity for emergent excellence.

This year the work of 41 organizations from around the world is recognized at the ZeroDX Awards. The winners are:

ZeroDX Award Winners 2025

Transformational

ASA Group

ASA Group is a metal packaging company, born 65 years ago in the Republic of San Marino. A history of growth and expansion through acquisitions has led it to eight production sites with a total turnover of 140 million euros. Now its 550 employees are set on a course of re-invention following the principles of RenDanHeYi.

Bayer

For over 160 years, Bayer has stood as a symbol of scientific progress in life sciences, with +100,000 employees across more than 100 countries, it is one of Europe’s most iconic multinationals. Yet it made the decision not just to streamline, but to fundamentally reimagine how the company worked. The result is a new operating system: Dynamic Shared Ownership.

Fajar Benua

In Indonesia Fajar Benua positions itself as a digital supply chain coordinator. Over 500 suppliers are connected through a shared digital platform. The company is no longer just a manufacturing and trading group, it is becoming a network of empowered micro-enterprises united by customer focus, shared data, and real accountability.

GE Appliances

Since joining the Haier ecosystem in 2016, GEA has reshaped strategy, structure, and operations to bring product creators closer to the people they serve, enabling faster innovation, deeper user engagement, and stronger business results. In 2025, it announced a US$3 billion investment to expand U.S. manufacturing, generating more than 1,000 new jobs.

Golden Communication

Set up in 1998, Golden Communication Group is one of Vietnam’s most established media and communications companies. Now it aspires to be a pioneering organization where people can learn, grow, and succeed together. The “Rebirth of the Phoenix” is still ongoing, but has already ensured that the company is stronger, more agile, and more sustainable.

Metafinanz

A consulting firm based in Munich, part of the Allianz Group, with around 900 employees and over three decades of experience, it primarily serves Allianz but also works with external clients. Until 2017, it was structured around centralized business lines, supported by classic hierarchies, and overseen by middle managers. And then it launched one of the most ambitious organizational transformations in Germany’s consulting sector.

Smartsheet

Known for its versatility, Smartsheet is used across industries to manage everything from project timelines to strategic initiatives. In mid-2024, Smartsheet's enterprise customer success team found itself at a crossroads. Faced with uncertainty, it saw the moment as an opportunity for radical reinvention.

VAR Group

The 52-year old Italian company supports companies in their digital evolution and develops business models to enhance their excellence worldwide. It has over 4200 employees in 15 countries, and turnover of +875 million euros. Its process of empowering its people, distributing leadership, and enabling entrepreneurship has already created

700 micro-enterprises in the business involving 45 percent of the company’s people.

Benchmark Innovators

Dectris

Founded in 2006, DECTRIS is a Swiss company specializing in cutting-edge X-ray detector technology. With around 180 employees, DECTRIS has undergone a deep cultural evolution, one where responsibility no longer needs to be delegated upward because it is owned from the ground up. Its journey shows how a willingness to confront dysfunction and nurture trust can lay the groundwork for transformation that is both human and lasting.

Gummy Industries

With 60 employees the Italian digital communication agency offers web design, branding, advertising, and influencer marketing services to Italian and international enterprises.

Established in 2011, it has reinvented its culture, philosophy and the way it works. Gummy has transformed into an incubator of new ventures, with employees co-creating and leading them through flat and autonomous teams, shared services to support scale and a unit already incorporated into a new entity.

Happy

Founded in 1987, Happy, a learning and development company based in London, has long resisted conventional corporate practices. Instead, promoting autonomy, shared responsibility, creating a place where people feel good about themselves. With around 30 employees, the company formalized its self-management philosophy in 2025 by becoming an Employee Ownership Trust.

HOLIS

HOLIS is a Japanese enterprise overseeing 27 businesses, including golf equipment, bridal services, and recycling shops, mainly in Aichi Prefecture. With more than 500 employees and over ¥7 billion in total business value, since 2018 it has been rewriting the rules of how a company can operate. Instead of hierarchy, it's built a system grounded in trust, ownership, and shared purpose.

HR-ON

From the beginning in 2012, HR-ON was designed as an organization rooted in trust and shared responsibility rather than traditional control. Self-management is more than a strategy; it is the foundation of the company’s identity. As HR-ON grew beyond Denmark into Germany, Scandinavia, and Japan, it has remained true to the belief in human-centered practices.

Lancor

A cooperative based in the Basque Country, with over 80-years experience in the design and manufacture of electric motors and generators. What sets Lancor apart is a model of self-management that places autonomy, transparency and shared responsibility at the center of its daily operations. Today, 115 people co-own and co-manage the cooperative, and over 80 percent are actively involved in shaping its structure and culture.

Net Protections

Known for helping establish Japan’s Buy Now, Pay Later market, the company is now equally recognized for pioneering a fully self-managed organizational model. What began over a decade ago as a cultural experiment has evolved into a deeply embedded system. Autonomy, customer proximity, and shared governance are no longer ambitions. They are business as usual.

SINA

Founded in Uganda in 2014, SINA unlocks the potential of Africa’s next generation of changemakers. Through self-organized, community-based learning environments, its network has grown to 20 communities across eight countries, with 1,639 jobs created and over 100 formal and 360 informal ventures launched. Its model is rooted in “freesponsibility,” combining freedom with responsibility, and emphasizes regeneration, purpose, and local ownership.

VkusVill

VkusVill has redefined the standards of grocery retail. It is one of the most recognized and trusted brands in Eastern Europe, operating in more than 160 cities across Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and the UAE. Since beginning its international journey in the Netherlands in 2020, it has continued to expand globally. Its team unites over 30,000 people who share the company’s core principles and values.

zeroG

When Lufthansa Systems founded zeroG nearly ten years ago, the ambition was to build a space that operated beyond the traditional boundaries of hierarchy and predictability; an environment where data talent could experiment and deliver solutions with real impact. zeroG demonstrates how Zero Distance principles can move beyond aspiration to become reality in one of the world’s most complex industries.

Emergent Excellence

AIT

Founded over thirty years ago in Vietnam as a family business, it became a trusted partner in design and manufacturing for the advertising industry. In 2020, with more than 100 employees, AIT chose renewal, reframing its mission to become an organization where people are self-managing, purposeful, and highly skilled; to build a structure where every person could see and shape the value they created.

Amber Online Education

Set up in Hanoi in 2015 with a clear mission: to make high-quality learning accessible to professionals and organisations across Vietnam.  Focused on co-creating learning experiences tailored to each client, it has moved to a structure based on small, autonomous teams able to respond quickly to evolving client needs.

Basetis

Founded in 2009, Basetis offers services ranging from software and mobile app development to data analytics, AI, cybersecurity, IT infrastructure, and digital marketing.  With no CEO, no central authority, and no perfect formula, it has found something better: trust strong enough to stand on its own.

Arsenalia

In 2019, six entrepreneurs decided to combine under a single vision. The result was Arsenalia, an Italian group created to bring together complementary expertise across digital experience, CRM, ERP, creativity, and cybersecurity. From the beginning, they did not want to reproduce the same structures they had seen constrain innovation elsewhere.

Bold2Move

A Stuttgart, Germany-based consultancy which believes organizations can be both high-performing and deeply human if freed from rigid hierarchies. It is a living example of the very philosophy it spreads: adaptive in structure, transparent in practice, and human in spirit.

Butterfly & Co.

In Belgium, Butterfly & Co. has built a reputation for guiding organizations through transformation in a way that is as practical as it is human. As a consultancy and as a transformation school, it believes that meaningful change is not something done to an organization but something cultivated from within by people who live it every day.

Digital Hangar

Digital Hangar was created in response to the imperative to rethink how digital products were conceived and built at the Lufthansa Group. It is a semi-autonomous organization combining operational delivery with transformation ambition, the digital pulse of aviation, reflecting a commitment to work proactively and design customer offers shaped by real-time data and continuous feedback.

Epoch

A pioneer of decentralization in high-tech manufacturing, its Galaxy model recognizes that while employees appreciate flexibility, they still need a common language to define purpose and responsibility. Galaxy could integrate self-management into every aspect of daily work reflecting the conviction that real autonomy demands both freedom and clarity.

Eppo

Founded in 1995 to improve urban environments in Brazil through waste collection and construction. Its transformation began in 2013. Decision-making is no longer confined to titles, and initiative is recognized wherever it appears. This has not only reshaped how Eppo operates, it has redefined what it means to belong to a company where people grow by leading and stay because it feels like their own.

foryouandyourcustomers

The Swedish company foryouandyourcustomers represents a leading value-driven, decentralized organization that fosters individual and collective development. By challenging traditional hierarchical structures and embracing flexibility, transparency, and shared success, foryouandyourcustomers has positioned itself as a leader beyond digital transformation.

Full Circle

The work of the Spanish transformation consultancy centers on a question: what if love could guide how we work? Full Circle embodies the same principles it helps clients adopt: a self-managed, purpose-led team helping other organizations transition to models of wholeness, autonomy, and collective intelligence.

Indaero

Specializing in engineering and advanced manufacturing, since its acquisition in 2023 the organization has transformed from a conventional, manager-led company into a self-managed workplace shaped by transparency, collaborative decision-making, and shared responsibility.

Inforyde

In 2021, Inforyde, a Madrid-based software development firm serving the energy sector, transitioned into a fully self-managed organization. This was the continuation of a long-standing commitment to building a workplace rooted in trust, autonomy, and authenticity.

Kitamoku

Kitamoku is building a new kind of enterprise: one that grows not by expanding output, but by aligning the rhythms of work with those of nature and human potential. Founded in 1994, Kitamoku has evolved into an ecosystemic business spanning forestry, firewood production, beekeeping, construction, and corporate training. In 2025, it began a new phase, no longer organizing around business lines, but redesigning itself around people.

Kopernicana

Rewriting the rules of work since 2018, Kopernicana supports organizations in moving beyond command-and-control models, adopting practices rooted in openness, inclusiveness, and adaptability. It was designed as a living experiment, embodying the practices of autonomy, transparency, and distributed ownership that it spreads.

Krisos

Co-founded by five individuals who set out to prove that companies can succeed by prioritizing people, not just profit, Krisos acquires small and mid-sized businesses that are ready for change. These companies often have 30 to 100 employees and a history of solid performance, but they’re held back by outdated hierarchies or looming succession problems.

Naumen

Founded in 2001, Naumen’s transformation began in 2017, when the company moved from being a traditional software vendor toward a customer-driven enterprise built on autonomous, empowered teams.

Now with +1300 employees, it focuses on flexibility, team autonomy, and direct customer connection. The result: a network of autonomous teams, each responsible for core processes and products.

Ocean Investments

A family-owned investment group based in Sofia, Bulgaria, with a mission to invest in and build companies that create long-term value for people and society. With +3,000 employees and over 60 million euros in revenue,

the organization is not just a capital allocator; it is a home for builders. Ocean seeks to give a platform to people who want to create, take responsibility, and shape the future.

Outcome

Outcome was born in 2022 out of the conviction that the problem was not people, but the system itself. Its mission is simple but ambitious: to make organizations better as they get bigger. Its product, TeamOS, is designed as the first operating system for continuous organizational transformation.

PCS

Beginning in 2010 with the ambition of connecting Vietnam to international markets, PCS has become one of the country’s fastest-evolving logistics enterprises. With +300 employees, PCS now reaches over 220 countries. From the outset, it positioned itself as an organization built around people, its guiding motto to “sow human values and deliver journeys of happiness,” and this has shaped every stage of its expansion.

RedMad Robot

Established in 2008, with eight offices in Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey 650+ people, RedMad Robot is creating a system where entrepreneurship is the norm, with employees becoming active agents of change, structured in an ecosystem of interdependent business units.

Teal Unicorn

The New Zealand-based company has become a catalyst for organizational change across Asia, particularly in Vietnam. Its Open Management approach combines agile thinking with cultural depth. Through coaching, simulations, and long-term advisory relationships, it helps organizations challenge outdated assumptions and adopt more adaptive ways of working.

Unity Group (UNIVIO)

Founded in 1997, Univio began as a consultancy in Poland’s nascent digital economy. It has become a leading commerce transformation partner, coordinating up to 30 technologies per project. Yet the company’s most significant transformation has been cultural rather than technological. Since 2016, Univio has operated a progressive organizational model centered on self-managed teams, distributed leadership, and a philosophy of transparency.

About the author:

Stuart Crainer is the cofounder of Thinkers50.