  We summarize results for local and global properties of the effective
potential for the Higgs boson obtained from the functional renormalization
group, which allows to describe the effective potential as a function of both
scalar field amplitude and RG scale. This sheds light onto the limitations of
standard estimates which rely on the identification of the two scales and helps
clarifying the origin of a possible property of meta-stability of the Higgs
potential. We demonstrate that the inclusion of higher-dimensional operators
induced by an underlying theory at a high scale (GUT or Planck scale) can relax
the conventional lower bound on the Higgs mass derived from the criterion of
absolute stability.
