That's a very good observation. The ability to respond, and speed of response, to environmental changes itself would have to be a factor in evolutionary fitness.

A vivid example is all around us: The human "noosphere", the social and intellectual environment we create around us as an invisible overlay on the material reality. Human evolution has shifted into the noosphere, where we evolve new ideas and technologies and beliefs at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. People generally try to identify one particular advantage of human intelligence, such as tool use or language, as "the" benefit of a big brain responsible for our success, but I think it's more fundamental: Our sociability let us build this noosphere and our ability to collaborate sustains it. Tools and language and so on are, in a sense, side effects of it...or more properly, its products.

Richard Dawkins coined the term "extended phenotype" to refer to artifacts that DNA constructs outside its host body: Bird's nests and beavers' dams are the standard illustrations. For a long time I thought of material human artifacts as our extended phenotype, but I've lately come to the conclusion that human artifacts are one step removed, unlike other species. The noosphere is our primary extended phenotype, and it is the instrument, in turn, of our ability to create visible artifacts. The human extended phenotype has a layer of indirection not seen in other species, and I think it fits your definition of an improved technique for evolution.