This paper highlights innovative ideas and concepts in higher engineering education reforms, based on urgent economic and social needs for leading engineers in the new science and engineering competition era. By analyzing various research in related topics, 10 kinds of significant concepts are extracted and summarized in three categories, namely, innovative institutions, engineering excellency oriented educational thoughts, and educational methods, actively reflecting urging intensions of local engineering focus and engineering uncertainty in the future world, emphasizing numbers of important characters of engineering education and learning procedures, typically, closer linkages between basic science and engineering bottlenecks, effective government-industry-university consortium, cross-field collaborative prototyping, as well as project-based learning, student-centered learning, and up-to-date engineering facilitating learning, etc.. These innovative concepts and summarized characters may provide useful reference for policy researchers and practitioners regarding engineering education reforms in China.