(FORTUNE Small Business) – Forgive me for feeling crushed. It's not that I doubt for a moment that the recently rolled-out Segway human transporter--you know, the scooter--will transform every walking moment of our lives. But its inventor, Dean Kamen, just didn't match my expectations. He was media-friendly, he was rich, and he came pre-endorsed by the likes of Steve Jobs. I want my inventors openly eccentric.

Which is why I visited Randice-Lisa Altschul. She works out of her father's two-bedroom home in Cliffside Park, N.J., having liquidated everything she owned and maxed out 35 credit cards to raise over $1 million for her latest invention. Step into the bedroom she used to share with her sister--trying not to dent the cranium of her dad's miniature schnauzer yipping at your heels--and you'll see piles of her latest brainstorm. This product, she predicts, will enable her to take her company, Dieceland Technologies, public. "The whole world is waiting for this one," says Altschul, who holds 24 patents, including pending ones.

Before we get to what this product (code name: Caesar) is, exactly, it's important to establish that the 41-year-old is hardly lacking in the track-record department. A college dropout, she created the Miami Vice board game in 1985, using it successfully to reach her goal: meeting then-heartthrob Don Johnson.

Taking off from there, she invented many games based on licensed characters, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to The Simpsons to Barbie's 30th Birthday Game. There were other toys too, including a line of racecars operated via motion-activated gloves, a version of Charades using clay, and a board game called Beyond Bitch in which players judged one another's gripes. "I can't explain why I can create things, but I can," says Altschul.

She's spent the past five years developing what she calls a phone-card-phone: a stripped-down disposable cell phone that's about the thickness of three credit cards, not counting the battery case and earplug. She got the idea, she says, while wanting to throw her malfunctioning cell phone out the car window. Working with engineers, she designed an ultrathin phone whose circuitry is printed on paper via conductive ink. After surface parts, such as the integrated circuit, are dropped on, the whole thing is wrapped, folded up, then laminated and sealed. "I took the toy mentality to telecom," says Altschul. "I made it cheap, and I made it dumb." Domestic models, which will cost between $10 and $30, offer 60 minutes of talk time and do not accept incoming calls.

Thanks to an incoming call from a GE executive early in 2001--somebody had heard about the project--Altschul snagged a North American distribution deal with GE Prepaid, an Atlanta-based business unit of the conglomerate. "You never know where the best ideas are going to come from," says Tim Dowd, the unit's executive vice president. "Randi is a very sales-y inventor, and this sounds like a great product." Like Altschul, he sees the device, which he expects to hit stores this year, as both a retail product--aimed at teenagers and the elderly, among others--and a promotional item. Beyond that, he says, "I'm not profound enough to know if this is going to change anything. I'm just the stodgy corporate guy."

Altschul, too, is going relatively corporate. She has just hired management and rented an office. Having focused on this invention since 1996, she's looking forward to nurturing other ideas: a backpack for scooter riders, a checkbook-sized laptop, an interactive breakfast cereal. "I'm nothing special," she insists. "I just have this ability to create stuff." Now, that's a real inventor.