Engineering Design Trends and Fast Innovation

A non-engineering colleague has asked me for some perspective on engineering design trends and fast innovation in these areas:

• BioMech & BioMed
• Chemical and Material Science
• Civil Engineering
• Communications and Electronics
• Electrical Engineering
• Instrumentation
• Manufacturing
• Mechanical Engineering
• Software & Programming

This is a pretty broad question, so what are you seeing in your own work processes?

For example, in my work for CR4, I'm learning (thanks to Milo's recent blog entry), that yield strength determination no longer requires tensile machines and expensive specimen preparation. The design benefit here is that smaller companies now have a way to more afford-ably characterize materials without the expense of outside lab services for sample prep and testing.

So how about you? What are seeing, hearing, and learning when it comes to engineering design trends and fast innovation?