"The main objective of the 3 years research activity herein described is the design and development of protocols for the colloidal synthesis of a new generation of multi-component hybrid nanocrystals (HNCs) with precisely tunable properties and applicability in energy conversion, (photo)catalysis and environmental remediation. In this context, MINE aboard the most problematic points related to the growth of multi-component materials, in particular the conditions by which it is possible to tune both, the materials that compose the structure and the morphology of the final structure (core-shell or oligomer-like configurations), by integrating the synthesis, the structural characterization and the study of NC properties. Among all the systems we will focus on the design and development of synthetic strategies for the production of metal-semiconductor, metal-semiconductor oxide and metal-metal oxide. The research activity has been divided in four different parts: i) the development of synthetic strategies for the production of multicomponent hybrid NCs, ii) the characterization and study of their physico-chemical properties, reactivity and structure-activity relationships iii) the study of their applicability and iv) the determination of their long-term use in terms of safety, sustainability and feasibility, a necessary step before promoting the ""real"" applications of these novel exciting nanostructures.We expect that results arising from MINE, will allow not only preparing new and long sought materials, but also re-designing many of the existing materials and recipes, and therefore moving the state of the art to the next step, which can be seen as the fifth-generation of NCs by design"