The nano-impact test is a technique for the high strain rate mechanical characterization of materials at the nano/microscale. However, its use has been limited so far due to the lack of appropriate methods to determine the dynamic hardness under impact conditions. The main limitation up to date has been the determination of the true applied force due to considerable inertia effects. This work overcame this limitation by instrumenting the testing device with force-sensing capability by means of a piezoelectric load cell. The potential applications of the technique will be illustrated based on a particular case study: the dynamic behaviour of composite materials. The work will show how the nano-impact testing technique can be used to extract the elasto-plastic constitutive behavior of the composite constituents, matrix and fiber/matrix interface, as a function of strain rate. For this, both micropillar compression and instrumented indentation tests carried out at different strain rates can be used. While the former is time consuming due to the tedious sample preparation required, the latter can provide a fast and reliable method, provided that an appropriate inverse methodology to extract the elasto-plastic properties from the indentations load displacement curves is implemented. Finally, the work will show how the strain-rate dependent composite constituent properties obtained using these methods can be used as input in physically-based computation micromechanics simulation tools to predict the failure initiation of composite plies over a wide range of strain rates. Examples of this approach to predict the transverse compression and in-plane shear behaviour of a carbon fibre reinforced epoxy matrix composite ply will be shown.