To get a sense of how and where Cork sees itself, you don't have to look far. The city centre is compact enough that from most vantage points you can see of a newly-built 17storey elevator shaft rising out of the otherwise uniform lowrise urban profile just south of the Lee. This is the Elysian, Cork's aspirational landmark building, a tigerish mix of living, working and shopping, and "a showpiece for the way city centre development should go", according to its website.

It's also a monument to Cork's resilient self-image at a crucial period in the region's economic development. No sooner had the shaft gone up than Motorola, a flagship multinational and a model for Ireland's high-tech, high-value ambitions, decided to wind down operations after 25 years in Mahon, a couple of miles to the east.

Come closer to the hoardings around the Elysian's building site at Eglinton Street, though, and you'll see supersized posters of modishly-lit models underscored with confident mottos: 'Better than you expected', 'Ireland's biggest secret' and 'Prepare for something that will change everything'.

And don't forget that, to the Greeks, the Elysian fields was the resting place for the souls of heroes. Hercules, it seems, was a Corkman, too.

When Motorola officially announced in early March that it would close its Cork offices with the loss of 330 jobs, it confirmed what had already looked inevitable in January.

Struggling to keep up with its rivals, the company sought to shed $400m from its global cost base, and the Mahon site looked dispensable.

Employees had seen it coming, as hiring had stopped long before and the site manager, Tom Shirley, had transferred to the US in mid-2006, leaving them without an advocate at corporate level.

But while there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Leinster House and Montrose over the blow . . . and there were a hard few weeks on the jobs front generally as winter turned to spring . . . Cork quickly got its act together. With valuable Motorola employees about to hit the market, other multinationals jockeyed for position: IBM announced a multimillion investment in its Cork plant; VMWare, a subsidiary of Cork stalwart EMC, promised 369 jobs in three to five years, and even small gaming software firm Havok said it would go looking for exMotorola staff.

And, significantly, some in Motorola had business plans of their own. By mid-March CorkBIC, a half-venture capital, half-state agency start-up support firm situated in the National Software Centre just around the corner from Motorola's big box office, was already helping 10 potential new enterprises emerge out of the telecoms company.

CorkBIC normally midwives about that many each quarter in a normal year. To get 10 from one source so quickly suggests that, for all the short-term pain the 330 lost jobs will cause for employees, their families and their communities, the long-term economic impact of Motorola's closure could turn out to be a net positive.

"We're expecting a lot of new activity, " says CorkBIC chief executive Michael O'Connor. "In five years you'll find more people working in Motorola spin-offs than were working in Motorola at the beginning of the year. These things can trigger latent entrepreneurial activity and, in the fullness of time, can be a good experience."

It's a bold prediction, and one that reveals a budding maturity in the local economy: direct dependence on multinationals is waning.

O'Connor points to research by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor showing Ireland has the second-highest level of entrepreneurialism among developed economies. This latency hides a rich reservoir of talent that, once released, represents the economic future, he argues.

Because Motorola has been a long-standing developer of highly-skilled labour and valuable research and development, the people coming out of that environment are primed to undertake new dynamic activities. So while losing the employment and all its spillovers has been a blow to the local economy . . . something O'Connor is quick to emphasise . . . that's not the end of the story. Although the catastrophic narrative of job loss is deeply imprinted in Irish cultural memory, the plot has taken a new course, in Cork at least.

One story that comes up again and again in conversations in Cork about Motorola is Digital, the US multinational whose Galway manufacturing operation shut down in 1993 with the loss of 780 jobs after 22 years, but whose exemployees put their training to good use in indigenous startups and other multinationals, ultimately generating even more economic activity.

Simon Martin, the site quality manager who is starting a remote IT home support business when he leaves Motorola at the end of the month, was actually a Digital employee in the Ayr, Scotland plant that won survival at Galway's expense.

"I've been inspired by the Digital story, " he says. "When I moved to Ireland I kept running in to ex-Digital people . . . an awful lot of that talent spread out."

John Phillips, Motorola Cork's HR director and country manager (the man who will roll up the carpets and turn out the lights in Mahon next month), is a Digital refugee himself. Although he's evasive about whether he, too, will strike out on his own this time or move laterally to another multinational, Phillips puts a lot of stock in the capabilities of his colleagues.

"The start-ups will be taking all the expertise, a broad spectrum of knowledge in processes, procedures and ability to manage, " he says. "Only when faced with a life-changing event do they see there's a need for their skill set. These highly motivated people have been treading water for two or three years . . . the time is right to look farther afield."

As these entrepreneurs spin out of the Motorola orbit, they're getting pulled towards a new centre of gravity: the National Software Centre.

When the NSC opened in 2002, it had the troubling shape and hue of a white elephant. The dotcom party had long ago ended and the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001 prolonged the hangover.

That summer only a handful of business rattled around what was then a lonely outpost in a bare business park.

Now 60 companies . . . from Horizon to one-man bands . . .call the NSC home. With its aromatic cafe and relaxed, airy lounge, the place has become a cluster of the informal networking that fertilises new businesses. Entrepreneurs check in with CorkBIC, mingle with each other, use the shared services, hot desk in spare office space and hobnob with clients in the centre's sturdy meeting rooms . . . basically creating a sense of establishment and collaboration. This is a dotcom dream that outlived the dotbomb nightmare.

John McAleer, director of the South West Regional Authority, was one of the dreamers and drivers of the NSC. When he evangelises about knowledge transfer in the Cork economy, he's talking about the dynamic between multinationals such as Motorola, third-level institutions, entrepreneurs and know-how brokers like CorkBIC. Knowledge, he explains, doesn't begin and end with R&D: what passes between individuals and institutions can be just as valuable.

McAleer is spearheading the Drive project, a Europeanfunded programme to make Cork's knowledge base accessible to start-ups and multinationals alike, to achieve a liquid knowledge market with few barriers. "Knowledge at the end of the phone" is how he describes it.

This vision is clearly a projection of the way he does business himself. He spends much of our drive between his office in Ballincollig and the city centre talking on his hands-free phone, lighting up his network of local contacts to get me a line on Comitel, the dotcom-era Motorola spin-out that turned into Valent and famously was bought by IBM. These guys won the start-up lottery . . . could the same happen for the latest batch? (No, says "cautious but enthusiastic" former Motorola systems engineer Trish Balfe, who is trying to launch a network software firm on the back of subcontracting and project-based product development: "They had dotcom funding . . . it's not repeatable". ) Cautious enthusiasm sums up the mood of ex-Motorola entrepreneurs in general. They have the fundamental tools, from usability knowledge to network management to quality assurance, and international experience in a world-leading firm. The key is putting it all together with the support provided by the likes of CorkBIC, Fas's start-up mentoring and CIT's Genesis programme, an incubation, training and seed funding project bringing commerce in contact with research.

The key is putting the edifice around the elevator shaft.