Entrepreneur Resources

Serial entrepreneur Scott Jones often gets asked for advice on everything from how to brainstorm good ideas for businesses to how to take a good idea and turn it into a viable business. He still remembers the challenges he faced as a young entrepreneur and would like to help others learn from his experience.

Here are his best tips for entrepreneurs.

Write down your ideas, no matter when or where they happen

“Many entrepreneurs describe their great ideas as a lightning bolt of inspiration, but to hear Jones tell it, he's prone to frequent thunderstorms. ‘All of a sudden I can't sleep, and I have all these ideas that are unrelated to each other,’ he describes. ‘I just spew them on the page, and it feels like I'm channeling from somewhere else.’

Five to ten ideas typically come at once, and anything not immediately scrawled down is lost forever. The episodes don't happen more than once every couple of months, he says, and dry spells have lasted as long as a year and a half. For reasons he can't determine, creative moments often happen on airplanes. ‘A lot of the ideas in my file cabinet were written on the backs of barf bags,’ he says. His staff has also filed away restaurant napkins covered in ink. ‘If I have that feeling, I've got to pay attention to it,’ he says, ‘because I can't control when it happens.’”

* Excerpt from November 2007 Fortune Small Business cover story “Inside the Mind of a Crazy (Rich) Inventor”

Never discount any ideas because of how impossible they seem

“Not all his idea generation is so mystical. Jones regularly holds ‘green light’ brainstorming sessions with two to six members of his staff in the whiteboard room of his private office. The lone rule is that there can be no negative comments. Nothing can be shot down. To protect his ideas, Jones records the sessions, photographs all the whiteboards before erasing them, and often has a patent attorney standing by to write up the next good idea.

The more impossible something seems, the more Jones likes it. What if there were a portal into the brain that could allow someone to see your thoughts? What if airplane passengers were loaded into pods within the airport and those pods could then be put on a plane?”

He loves to tackle new industries about which he knows little. When he tells doctors of his plan to sequence a human's DNA in 60 seconds (it now takes two months), they always think he's loony. ‘I think that's great,’ Jones says with emphasis. ‘I don't want to come at it the way they do. They're stuck. They're boxed in. I'm coming in from an orthogonal angle and asking, 'Why not do it this other way?’”

* Excerpt from November 2007 Fortune Small Business cover story “Inside the Mind of a Crazy (Rich) Inventor”

Look for inspiration in unusual places

On the third floor of his home, a thumbprint scanner unlocks the door to his inner sanctum. A spiral staircase leads to his attic office suite, where he typically works until two or three in the morning. In it, he has a room with whiteboards floor to ceiling - and even on the ceiling - where he works out the details of his brainstorms. The suite also includes a room piled high with such gear as a signal generator, an oscilloscope, and a solar oven. This room and its odd furnishings, he says, serve as a laboratory in which he can tinker with new inventions. ‘When RadioShack has a sale, I buy them out,’ he says, gesturing to six black bags of gear.

To get his creative juices flowing, Jones often engages in bizarre behavior: eating without utensils, watching TV a foot away from the screen. ‘Anything I normally do, I'll do it differently just to see what happens,’ he says. ‘One time I sat so close to a screen that I could see the different colors in each pixel. It caused me to think about how you would make a flat-panel display that's part of your cellphone.’ His chief of staff once caught him standing back from the dinner table and using a fork with a three-foot-long telescoping handle. ‘It was the strangest thing I've ever seen,’ she laughs.”

* Excerpt from November 2007 Fortune Small Business cover story “Inside the Mind of a Crazy (Rich) Inventor”

Never give up

When Scott promised Bell Atlantic that he and his Boston Technology co-founder could give them a voicemail system that promised to handle 20 times the call volume of their existing systems, guaranteed 99.998% reliability and would be delivered in three months at roughly the same cost, there was just one problem: Their product didn't exist.

Facing a task that was seemingly impossible, Scott put his head down and went to work. He barely left the office for three months, sleeping under his desk -- when he slept at all.

Did it pay off?

Scott made enough from Boston Technology to retire by age 31. (Obviously, retirement didn’t agree with him.)

“Once Jones gets sold on one of his ideas, he'll go to almost any length to make it happen. Ajay Bansal, 45, ChaCha's newly hired VP of engineering, was living happily in San Jose with his wife and 9-year-old daughter when one of Jones's recruiters called. He was intrigued by the job offer but not by the idea of living in Indiana. He declined. Jones continued interviewing dozens of candidates but found himself comparing them with Bansal. ‘I had to go get him,’ says Jones matter-of-factly.

So he called Bansal once a week for months. He flew out Bansal's whole family and gave them private tours of the Indianapolis Zoo and Children's Museum (his foundation gives generously to both). They petted baby elephants, felt a triceratops fossil, and heard Jones's lengthy spiels on the advantages of raising children in Indiana. ‘Any roadblock I threw up, he said, 'Tell me what the issue is and I'll solve it,'’ says Bansal. ‘The 'no' was not acceptable. I ran out of excuses not to join the company.’"

* Excerpt from November 2007 Fortune Small Business cover story “Inside the Mind of a Crazy (Rich) Inventor”

Think of new uses for old technology

“In 2005 Jones sponsored a team to compete in the second DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition to create and race an unmanned vehicle for a $2 million prize and the prospect of lucrative military contracts. Because of a small technical glitch, the $400,000 robot peeled out at the starting line, veered right, and crashed into a wall. Jones, however, encourages his employees to take ideas and turn them inside out until they make sense as a business.

He ended up building a company out of his robot technology, but not quite the one he imagined. The late management sage Peter Drucker said that innovation often occurs when an entrepreneur takes an idea in an entirely new direction. And that's what Jones did with Precise Path, which is developing robotic lawn mowers that will neatly mow golf course greens.

In the garage of a small Colonial house on Jones's estate, Doug Traster, formerly the leader of Jones's Indy Robot Racing Team and now president of Precise Path, points to several color 3-D schematics taped to the wall, which show the evolution of the idea. After deciding an unmanned Jeep posed too many liability issues, the team considered robotic chemical sprayers that would protect workers from inhaling chemicals. ‘The demand wasn't there,’ says Traster.

They considered a lawn mower, dubbed ‘the purple lozenge’ for its size and shape. But the technology was too expensive for the consumer market. The team then pitched fairway mowers to golf course managers, but they all said what they really needed was a better mower for putting greens. Traditional mowers create small imperfections that disrupt the speed and uniformity of the green. That's when Traster decided to manufacture robotic mowers that promise much smoother greens. Production is planned for 2009, and Jones says the company already has a $200,000 order from a distributor for ten of the machines.”

* Excerpt from November 2007 Fortune Small Business cover story “Inside the Mind of a Crazy (Rich) Inventor”