Designing Work Without Distance: The Kopernicana Story
Kopernicana was born as an idea in 2018 and established as a company the following year. From the outset, it wasdesigned not as a conventional consultancy but as a living experiment. Its founders wanted the organization itself toembody the practices of autonomy, transparency, and distributed ownership that they aimed to spread. Within a few years, revenues were growing at 200 percent year on year, with projections of three million euros by 2025. The company counts twenty partners, nine of whom are also shareholders, and all outwardly hold the same title of partner, reflecting equality rather than hierarchy.
This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:
Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace
Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution
Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.
The mission is to “rewrite the rules of work,” a goal that combines cultural and professional ambition. Kopernicana supports organizations in moving beyond command-and-control models, adopting instead practices rooted in openness, inclusiveness, and adaptability. Its approach is participatory and people-centered. Solutions are not imposed from above but co-created with employees at every level, ensuring that what emerges is relevant, innovative,and practical. This reflects the RenDanHeYi principle of zero distance, where organizations become tools in the hands of those who inhabit them, shaped around the impact they want to create.
Inside the company, structure follows circles and roles inspired by Holacracy. Partners hold multiple roles acrossprojects, some assigned and some elected, and can step away from roles at any time. Certain circles operate asmarket-facing micro-enterprises with their own profit and loss, while others act as shared service platforms supporting internal operations. Budgets are handled directly within these circles and project teams, including decisions about how to allocate resources and compensate contributors. This distribution of financial ownership aligns with RenDanHeYi’s focus on entrepreneurial autonomy within micro-enterprises.
Transparency is the default. All information, from contracts and invoices to compensation and cash flow, is accessible to every partner. This openness extends to financials, project economics, and even the sales pipeline. It enablesevery partner to act with full knowledge and to connect decisions directly with results. Autonomy is balanced with accountability through collective rituals: regular retrospectives, feedback practices, and conflict resolution processes. With no one acting as another’s boss, everyone is expected to both provide and request feedback, ensuring that freedom of action is grounded in responsibility.
Beyond its internal structure, Kopernicana also invests in building ecosystems. It coordinates the Italian Rebel Cell ofCorporate Rebels, and in July 2025 became one of the founders of the Decentral Consortium. This consortium is the first of its kind in Italy to organize
business-to-business collaboration through a transparent, participatory, and distributed model. Its goal is to turnmarket tensions such as innovation, sustainability, and belonging into sources of collective energy. Drawing on principles of people-centeredness, radical transparency, and continuous experimentation, the consortium brings together autonomous micro-enterprises in synergy. Its practices are shared under Creative Commons, spreading what Kopernicana describes as a fractal way of organizing: empowering individuals, making enterprises adaptive, and strengthening ecosystems through coordination.
The results of this journey are visible in the field. Kopernicana has supported more than one hundred client organizations, including large companies, SMEs, public administrations, and nonprofits. Together with them it has implemented over three hundred transformation sites, co-designing practices, tools, and experiments. More thanfifteen thousand people have been trained in OKR methodology through its programs. These achievements illustratenot only the reach of Kopernicana’s work but also the practical diffusion of a cultural shift: organizations that once relied on controlare experimenting with openness, adaptability, and distributed ownership.
Kopernicana’s story shows how RenDanHeYi principles can take root outside of industrial contexts, finding expressionin professional services, consulting, and networks of collaboration.
By combining autonomy with transparency, spreading ownership through circles and micro-enterprises, andfostering ecosystems that extend beyond its own boundaries, the company demonstrates that designing work without distance is not just a vision. It is already happening, both within itsown structure and in the many organizations it accompanies on the path of transformation.
