Nanotechnology may be a very nascent field but it couldn’t have asked for a more vociferous champion than Justin Hall-Tipping.

If you’re going to change the world, after all, it helps to have someone on your side whose imagination doesn’t take no for an answer—and it doesn’t get more imaginative than wanting to solve our energy and water problems.

“Our system is broken,” says Justin. “Short-term thinking of how we should use the world’s precious resources has led us all to this awful place. Couple that with people’s investment horizons becoming so short term and you virtually guarantee no viable solutions in the time we have left.”

Justin, whose MBA from Harvard and BSc in International Finance and Banking seem an unusual foundation for his professional trajectory, isn’t deterred by the sheer scale of his ambition.

“By definition we’re looking for massive scientific breakthroughs. Average ideas aren’t going to work.”

Like the rest of the world, he shares concerns over climate change, rising energy demand and critical water shortages.

Unlike the rest of the world, though, he’s not prepared to leave finding solutions to these challenges to chance.

Neither does he believe that the scientific breakthroughs needed will ‘just happen’.

Instead, in 2000 he set up a company called NanoHoldings with a single agenda: to hunt out nanotechnology solutions to our most pressing global resource problems by partnering with the best scientists at universities around the World and funding their extraordinary ideas.

From game-changing breakthroughs in energy generation and energy storage, to production of pure drinking water, NanoHoldings’ breakthroughs are already making tomorrow’s headlines.

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