Lipatov's QCD high energy effective action: past and future

In this contribution we briefly review some aspects of Lipatov's gauge invariant QCD high energy effective action. The high energy effective provides a field theory framework to systematically factorize QCD scattering amplitudes and related theories in the limit of high center of mass energies. After a short review of the underlying concepts, we address the question how the high energy effective action can be used for actual calculations. As an explicit example we review the derivation of the gluon Regge trajectory up to 2 loop. We then review two topics of current interest: automatic amplitude generation of high energy effective action amplitudes and a discussion of the relation between the so-called Color-Glass-Condensate framework and the high energy effective action.