How to avoid coming up with a new way of doing the same old thing

If you REALLY want to understand what's happening with NFV then you must listen to Tom Nolle, Chief Analyst & President of CIMI Corporation and architect of Cloud NFV. Martyn Warwick did and amongst the Nolle gems:

the industry has to transform the way it thinks about everything, but that's too complicated to grasp in abstract; NFV ETSI initiative was born because operators wanted to foster a new, independent group of (IT) suppliers; and no major vendors were permitted to be part of the original group.