Very little, you might say, except single-minded zeal to pursue a dream without letting petty niceties get in the way.

Ardently pro-business Wrixon, who announced last week that he is retiring earlier than expected, ended up with plenty of pies on his face as he tried to beat the university into his idealised image. He drove a lot of people crazy, and got embroiled in spats and expensive law suits with academic staff. He battled hard to delay his retirement, prompting surprise last week that he is calling it a day at age 66.

Few would question Wrixon's self-belief and drive. Even fewer would call him a diplomat, as being nice to people wasn't his thing. But he got a lot done.

He was the driving force behind Cork's National Microelectronics Research Centre (NMRC), without which many believe Ireland would have no Intel. He had the ear of Charlie Haughey in the 1980s.

Wrixon was a maverick in his enthusiasm for bringing third-level education closer to business. With the economy boisterous, and new figures revealing that two million of us are working, it would be easy to lose focus on the urgency of the need to tighten links between higher education and industry and to foster more university spin-offs.

We'll be sorry in the long run if we do.

The suspicious might think Enterprise Ireland is actually goading the universities with the 30m fund it just announced to enable them to hire technology transfer officers.

It would be a compliment to describe as patchy the record of Irish universities in spinning out successful companies. Iona Technologies had a famously rocky road out of TCD. UCD produced Timoney Technologies, founded by mechanical engineering professor Eanna Timoney. Where are the rest of the international luminaries?

Since Science Foundation Ireland came on the scene, and since the Higher Educational Authority started demanding strategic plans in exchange for grants, progress has been made in developing links between third-level institutions and multinationals. Farther down the corporate chain, it's trickier for local entrepreneurs to know where to turn.

There will be no excuse now for universities not to hire more commercial types who can treat intellectual property as valuable commercial property and can talk the talk with business people. By all accounts, EI's interim policy of installing its own technology transfer staff on campuses has not been wholly satisfactory.

Answering to two masters can be an exhausting business.

The biggest challenge, though, will be to change the culture of third-level institutions. The newgeneration colleges such as Dublin City University and University of Limerick, headed by the energetic Ed Walsh, have a clear, business-friendly agenda.

Elsewhere there is progress, with UCD's Hugh Brady signalling his willingness to play ball with industry.

But hundreds of years of tradition and of entrenched academic fiefdoms are hard nuts to crack. Just ask Wrixon. In a bid to ensure he had like-minded lieutenants and minimal dissent, he pushed to cut the number of faculties at UCC to four and to set up a new business school that would at first report directly to him.

Strengthening Wrixon's hand was the fact that he was in the relatively unusual position in academia of having commercial kudos.

He left his position as director of the NMRC to head UCC. Now he also has plenty of cash to fund his retirement or next project.

Advanced weapons detection company Farran Technology, one of the first companies to spin out of the NMRC, sold last year for 24m, yielding Wrixon over 6m.

Maybe the answer is to parachute into academia a few rich, entrepreneurial tsars not afraid of stepping on toes. Mansfield anyone?

Though he is probably too busy concocting another ingenious plan to save the skeleton of his conference centre from the scrapyard.

The catch with that proposal (well, OK, one of the catches) is that Wrixon always knew where the power was and how to get close to it. Whatever else you might say about Mansfield, you couldn't accuse him of that. All those Fianna Fail ard fheiseanna, and still no planning permission.