Pigliucci gives a good review of some aspects of this topic in "Is evolvability evolvable?" (2008). He sees what you're asking about, which he calls "evolvability", as one of the key topics for the future of the study of evolution.
It's very conceptually dense evo-devo-theory, so I'll probably do a poor job trying to explain it, but he tries to set up a framework that deals not just with things like life-history (per kmm's answer) and mutation/recombination rate (low fidelity in HIV per GWW's answer, and, I suppose, the evolution of sex itself), but also with constraints that evolve at various levels to "positively channel" mutation (that is, the understanding that while mutations are effectively random, the phenotypes that emerge, and are acted upon by natural selection, are not random, but are channelled by the developmental system of the organism).
He also includes the role of development in opening up "phenotypic space" into which a lineage may evolve. For instance, single-celled organisms have a limit on size and complexity, the evolution of multicellularity opens up this huge zone of evolvability. In a sense, this is also the "evolution of evolution".
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