The startup rate is high, but most of those enterprises are sole proprietorships.

That's according to research from the Kauffman Foundation. (For more on the topic of no-employee businesses, see today's post by my colleague Steve Taub.)  It found that more Americans have launched their own business than any time in the past 15 years. But many of them are flying solo. Specifically the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity found that .34 percent of American adults started a business each month in 2010-565,000 firms. At the same time, the quarterly employer firm rate dropped from .13 percent in 2007 to .10 percent in 2010.

President Obama's Startup America Partnership, announced earlier this week, will benefit mostly one particular sector of the small business world.

Still it looks like the program has real legs.

A lot of fuss has been made about new Kauffman Foundation research  showing a substantial rise in the number of startups in 2009--the highest rate in 14 years. But what's been left out of the commentary is how those findings compare to an exhaustive Kauffman study disclosed a few months ago. It demonstrated that the number of new firms created in the US over a period of several decades, ending with 2005,  remained fairly constant over time.

The clear implication: The current crisis, with its precipitous increase in unemployment, has caused an unprecedented rise in startup activity.