(FORTUNE Small Business) – If awards were handed out for "best save," small-business owners in the U.S. would probably qualify. Even during the worst of the recent recession, entrepreneurs launched about six million new businesses a year, a number that has stayed consistent over the past decade. Those startups were one of the main reasons the recession wasn't more severe.

However, the complexion of new business has been evolving lately. The number of firms launched by minorities has been growing fast, up 17% a year, according to the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in California. The trend is likely to continue. A recent survey by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurship, found that African Americans are 50% more likely to start a business than whites. Latinos are 20% more likely. "The big story here is the face of small business is changing," says Betsy Zeidman, head of research on emerging markets at the Milken Institute. "It can't be ignored anymore."

Given the dynamic growth of minority businesses, it seems time for a closer look. In the following pages you'll read about entrepreneurs who have not only succeeded at business but also smashed some old stereotypes. People such as Valerie Red-Horse, a Native American who started her own bank, Red-Horse Securities. Or Sheeraz Hasan, a Pakistani immigrant from London, who moved to Los Angeles knowing no one and within months had launched a Hollywood gossip television show. Or Ed Chin, who owns a pioneering insurance firm with $40 million in annual sales.

We weren't just cherry-picking either. The stereotypical minority-owned businesses--mom-and-pop retail stores in low-income areas with customers mostly from their own communities--are still around, but they're not where the real growth is. Instead, says Timothy Bates, professor of labor and urban studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, minorities are launching startups in fields such as finance, insurance, and media. The number of African-American firms in the financial services sector has increased sixfold over the past 20 years. "The minority sector is increasingly sophisticated," Bates says. "To not see that is to miss a business opportunity."

As the old categories fall away, a few new patterns are emerging. Hispanics own more businesses than any other minority group, and because of population trends their lead is likely to grow. By 2007, a recent IRS report predicts, one of every ten small businesses will be Latino-owned, compared with one of 13 today. Meanwhile, Asian-owned companies tend to be bigger than the typical minority small business, with average annual revenues of $336,000. And African Americans are the group most likely to become entrepreneurs. Black men between 25 and 35 with some graduate school work start more businesses than any other group in the country, according to the Kauffman Foundation.

If all those business owners have made the choice not to work for corporate America, that doesn't mean they can't work with corporate America. Fortune 500 companies are increasingly choosing to buy from minority suppliers not because anyone forces them to do so but because it's good for business. "Supplier diversity is really a big part of the rise of minority entrepreneurs," says Luke Visconti, co-founder of a publishing group called Diversity Inc., based in New Brunswick, N.J. Visconti notes that doing business with minority firms helps big corporations develop customer loyalty in those populations. "The fact that there is 'gold in them thar hills' is finally catching on," he says.

Last year big companies spent more than $70 billion with minority suppliers, according to the National Minority Supplier Development Council, which helps determine which businesses qualify as "minority owned." (The 51% rule is used.) That's up from $63 billion in 2001 and just $47.8 billion in 1999. Some entrepreneurs have created businesses specifically to capture supplier-diversity dollars. Consider Jonathan Pinson, CEO of Cascades Food Group. The 33-year-old African American was already the founder and managing partner of Pindrum, his family's staffing company in South Carolina, when he decided to go into the potato business too. At a restaurant trade show in 1998 he saw how much business there was for wholesale French fry vendors (the largest food supplier business in the restaurant industry). Pinson also noticed there was little diversity in the sector. So he set out to fill the void, buying 6,000 acres of potato fields in Washington State in 2001. Some of Cascades' farmers had never worked with an African American before, much less for one, says Pinson. Now minority-owned Cascades is being bombarded with new contracts to supply French fries. Revenue grew by 25% in the past year, to $35 million--in part because major companies are looking to diversify their suppliers. The company's deals include Denny's, the Philadelphia Eagles, the MGM Mirage casino in Las Vegas, TGI Friday's, and the Orlando school district.

With all that good news, there's still one area in which few minorities have broken through--access to financing. A Kauffman study showed that people of color are denied credit more often, and pay higher interest rates, when compared with white business owners. Latino- and black-owned businesses get rejected for bank loans nearly twice as often as white-owned companies, according to the Federal Reserve. As a result, the Milken Institute estimates, half of all minority entrepreneurs don't bother applying for loans, figuring they'll only get turned away.

That's especially regrettable when you consider that the businesses they own might be good investments. A Kauffman Foundation study released last summer found that venture capital firms investing in minority-oriented companies post higher returns than the VC industry as a whole. (Part of the difference comes from the technology losses that traditional VCs suffered, while minority-based VCs invested more conservatively.) Yet the National Association of Investment Companies estimates that as little as 2% of all venture capital, or about $2 billion, goes to entrepreneurs of color. "Despite the gains, minority business is still one of the underutilized resources in America," says Heyward Davenport, a director at the U.S. Department of Commerce's Minority Business Development Agency. "The gaps haven't widened, but they haven't closed either."

Maybe the next generation will help address that. A poll of kids ages 13 to 18 conducted by Junior Achievement, an organization that educates young people about business, found that minorities were more interested than whites in becoming entrepreneurs. Some 89% of Asian teenagers polled, 86% of black teenagers, and 79% of Latino teens said they want to start their own businesses, compared with 69% of white kids.

Those are the people who will launch startups in the coming decades. And when the U.S. economy sputters, they'll be the ones who help save it.