I will be reviewing the details of a novel form of the Higgs mechanism, present in the context of the Bagger-Lambert and ABJM proposals for the worldvolume description of multiple parallel M2 branes. I will also discuss some of its implications as well as describe related applications. The latter will focus on the determination of four-derivative corrections to the Bagger-Lambert A_4-theory for all values of the Chern-Simons level k