An overview of the Faraday Discussion meeting on harnessing non-covalent interactions for synthesis and catalysis, is presented. This covers progress in the field across chemical biology, bioinspired catalysis using homogeneous coordination complexes, supramolecular approaches for catalysis, advanced diffraction and spectroscopic methods for the measurement of structure and the influence of non-covalent interactions, and how computational tools inform and start to predict the role of non-covalent interactions.