The M-Lab is a joint research initiative of the Chair of Information Management at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, the Distributed Systems Group at the Department of Computer Science, both at ETH Zurich, and the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen.

These institutes have established strong research partnerships with a number of renowned universities, known as the Auto-ID Labs, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), University of Cambridge (UK), ICU (Korea), Fudan (China), Adelaide (Australia), and Keio (Japan). Being part of this network, the M-Lab promotes a vivid exchange of ideas, extensive cross lab cooperation in research projects, and exchange semesters of research staff. SAP Research has Campus-based Engineering Center (CEC) in St. Gallen and Zurich, which are associated to the M-Lab.

After six years of fundamental cross-sector research, we decided to concentrate our research more on industry-specific values. Therefore Prof. Elgar Fleisch and Prof. Friedemann Mattern have founded the I-Lab (Insurance), the Retail Research Initiative (Retail & Supply Chain) and the Bits to Energy Lab, which focuses on the impact of Ubiquitous Computing for an efficient use of resources.

Besides the activities in these labs, the M-Lab coordinates also several EU-founded research projects like SToP, BRIDGE and STOLPAN.