A few years ago i went to this talk where the founder of Kiva Systems (automated warehouse systems) was giving a talk. He was mentioning how he came up with the idea, and it was actually quite a structured approach. He altered the parameters to the theoretical maximum (what if the warehouse was an infinite size) what would the solution be? What he eventually came up with is the system they have today.

Structural thinking, the way Musk talks about is really useful. It is not intuitive to move the shelves instead of the warehouse picker, and thinking by analogy probably wouldn't have lead to that moment of inspiration.