This may be the worst of times to be looking for a job but it is among the best to be starting up on your own. One thing distinguishing this recession from previous ones is there are lots more young entrepreneurs and lots of low-cost opportunities to exploit. Whether they will create jobs to make up for even part of the loss caused by the financial collapse is arguable but we must nurture them.

I was reminded of this at a recent workshop hosted by the Brunel University entrepreneurs society, where nearly 150 youngsters, mostly from ethnic minorities, turned out in their spare time to hear a panel of speakers and do five-minute mock pitches for funding before a mini Dragons' Den of judges. An event such as this, full of energy and enthusiasm, was unheard of in my youth and you would have been pushed to find it in the dotcom boom of the 1990s.

It is part of a flowering of entrepreneurial talent in London and other regions. Christian Ahlert's MiniBar in east London, for instance, regularly attracts 300 people to network and hear people with ideas pitching for funds and sometimes has to turn people away. This month's theme, "Hyper-Local", features embryonic start-ups such as Richard Pope's StreetWire, HopHive, Spoonfed, and AudioBoo - an iPhone app about sharing contextual broadcasting, not yet public. Ahlert, who is launching Yumshare, for joint buying to reduce the cost of food, says MiniBar is still growing despite a recession that has made venture capitalists pull in their horns.

And the James Dyson Foundation announced last week it is giving £5m to the Royal College of Art to fund a new building, including 40 business "incubator units" where graduates can take their designs from drawing board to marketplace. Saul Klein's OpenCoffee Club meets once a week on Thursdays in London, as does The Tuttle Club on Fridays. For meet-ups near you try meetup.com.

What makes this exciting is that a wave of new entrepreneurs is coinciding with unprecedented opportunities to develop. Don't think depression, think opportunity. Not only is the cost of web startups barely 10% of what it was in the dotcom boom, but there is a vast new market opening up for the bedroom entrepreneur thanks to the exploding possibilities of the mobile phone. On some counts more than 15,000 applications have been developed for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Apple has created what our mobile operators were too myopic to see: a market where small creators can sell their wares in an easy way to customers that lets them keep most of the income. The iPod Touch is also a big outlet for casual games, itself a huge growth area. And this is only the beginning of a new market as the pursuit of fairly rewarded creativity spreads to other phones using Google's Android operating system or Nokia's ovi.com, launched this week and aiming to get 50 million users quickly in an assault on Apple.

Trade generated from mobiles - from music to books - is already massive and hasn't yet got into its stride. Half the planet has a mobile, creating a networked market the like of which has never been seen before. The ecosystem of the mobile phone is a unique economy in its own right, in which consumers merge with producers fired by something the web never had: a simple micropayments system.

How best to exploit this unprecedented opportunity? The joint stock company - first popular in Elizabethan times - looks inappropriate after the financial collapse. We need new corporate forms for a new era. Maybe people with ideas should join together in groups of 20 or 50, donating their business plans as their equity and inviting potential investors on the web to put up money in the hope that enough ideas will be viable to give them a decent return. I'd rather put my money in something like that than leave it to banks to invest in the next black hole they find.

• vic.keegan@theguardian.com