In recent years there has been a growing interest for developing efficient and selective homogeneous iron catalysts, thanks to the far lower cost and greater abundance of iron over the more precious metals. During my PhD thesis, in order to improve the catalytic activities or achieve novel reactivity, we decided to modify the framework of the Knölker-type complex and to develop a small library of ten new chiral pre-catalysts, bearing a binaphthyl-derived backbone with different 3,3’-substituents, for the enantioselective hydrogenation of ketones (up to 52% ee). (Eur. J. Org. Chem., 2015, 5526-5536; Eur. J. Org. Chem., 2015, 1887-1893). In addition to the ongoing development of chiral variants of the Knölker motif, our group was also interested in opening new vistas in catalyst design by accessing new catalyst structures easily to synthesize and with different reactivity profiles. A new [bis(hexamethylene)cyclopentadienone]iron tricarbonyl complex was synthesized, which showed more stability and better reproducible results respect to the known Knölker-Casey catalyst underlined by TON, TOF and kinetic measurements. Recently, we also developed a new generation of planar chiral (cyclopentadienone)iron tricarbonyl pre-catalyst, the results are promising but the research is still under investigation.