Wisconsin businessman and philanthropist Michael Cudahy is leading a state delegation to discover how to turn 'America's Dairyland' into a thriving high-tech economy, writes Gabrielle Monaghan.

Michael Cudahy was just a child when he fell through the roof of the American ambassador's residence in the Phoenix Park. He had been tuning the antenna of a handheld radio operator he built when he slipped and crashed through a skylight window, much to the horror of his father, John, who was ambassador to Ireland between 1936 and 1940.

Cudahy, now 81, survived to tell the tale. The electronics hobby he cultivated as a child eventually led him to co-found Marquette Electronics in Milwaukee, a venture that saw him become a millionaire.

"When I visited four years ago, a secretary at the residence told a former Wisconsin governor that a terrible thing had happened - a child had fallen through the roof and died," Mr Cudahy recalled while sidestepping puddles on the footpath en route to the Mansion House this week. "The governor said: 'That fellow's not dead - he's sitting right next to you'."

The Wisconsin businessman, whose grandfather's family left Co Kilkenny for the US during the Famine, returned to Ireland this week. This time, Mr Cudahy wasn't going back to trace his roots, but to help the state of Wisconsin learn from Ireland's economic successes.

"I went to Tim Sheehy [ the president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce] and said I've got a jet, so let's you and I and some top officials go to Ireland to see firsthand how its success evolved and get some ideas for Wisconsin."

Cudahy's jet, decorated with shamrocks and streamlined in green, flew into Shannon on Sunday, carrying Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, the chancellor of Wisconsin Carlos Santiago, Tim Sheehy, and John Gleeson, the Irish co-director of the Center for Celtic Studies.

The group went to Galway on Monday to meet the director and chairman of the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology to discuss the institutes' role in facilitating regional economic development through its work with the city council, Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. The trip also included visits to the Boston Scientific and Hewlett-Packard plants.

"We've been looking in Ireland at how we can go about upgrading our economy," Governor Doyle said, as he sipped a Coke in the Westbury Hotel. "We are a significant manufacturing state, ranking second in the US in terms of citizens employed in manufacturing. But we are very rapidly developing the biotech side."

Wisconsin is twice the size of Ireland, with a population of 5.3 million. Agriculture, particularly dairy farming, still accounts for 20 per cent of the state's gross domestic product, Governor Doyle said.

Milwaukee, the state's largest city, is better known as the home of Miller beer than for its technology and financial services companies.

"The goal of this trip is to see how Ireland so dramatically turned itself around," the mayor of Milwaukee said. "We're learning here that there were years of educational preparation."

The Wisconsin delegation met the chief executive of the Higher Education and Training Awards Council (HETAC) to find out how it set about making third-level education more relevant to the Irish economy.

According to a 2004 report in the Economist, Wisconsin is experiencing difficulty keeping its third-level graduates at home. "Without a smart urban centre of its own to attract young professionals, Wisconsin has seen an exodus of college graduates in the past two decades," the business magazine said.

In addition, Wisconsin ranked just 29th for job opportunities in the US in a study released in October by the Political Economy Research Institute, an independent unit at the University of Massachusetts.

While the state's economy is growing, it's not creating enough jobs and the manufacturing sector, the backbone of Wisconsin's economy, is still recovering from the toll taken on it by the US recession.

The state's attempt at a transition to a biotech and technology-led economy is beginning to bear fruit. Wisconsin's 338-company bioscience industry surpassed the beer sector in 2005, with a direct impact of more than $6.9 billion, according to a report issued late last year by the Wisconsin Association for Biomedical Research and Education.

In 2001, 3.8 per cent of Wisconsin workers were employed in the technology sector compared with 4.5 per cent nationally. By 2004, that position had improved, with 4.3 per cent of the state's workers in high-tech jobs, compared with 4.9 per cent for the entire country.

The University of Wisconsin is also tied with Harvard as the most common alma mater for top US executives, a study by executive search firm Spencer Stuart has found.

Governor Doyle said the state is stimulating the transition to a high-tech economy by funding research, giving grants, loans and tax credits, and by financing "a great deal" of new companies. The governor recently signed legislation enabling the state to give $250 million (€207 million) in tax credits to start-up firms over the next seven to eight years.

"Other states have done this but our legislation was the most far-reaching," the governor said.

Cudahy's ties to Wisconsin's economic, political and civic affairs are strong. His Irish grandfather, Patrick, founded a major meat-packing company in the state and developed the namesake Milwaukee suburb of Cudahy. He also built the lakefront Cudahy Towers in the city's downtown area, a building now owned by Michael Cudahy.

The businessman set up Marquette Electronics, a maker of health-monitoring systems, in 1965 with Warren Cozzens on the back of capital investment of just $15,000. Three decades later, the company generates about $350 million in annual sales and employs 2,200 people after demand for medical services surged in the US.

Marquette Electronics was sold to GE Medical Systems in 1998.

After stepping aside at his company, the millionaire focused his energies on philanthropy. He donated the Cudahy Research Center for use by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Industrial Innovation Center and has made donations to the city's ballet, opera, and symphony orchestra, as well as to its school of engineering, the Milwaukee Art Museum and Milwaukee Public Museum.

Cudahy, camera hanging around his neck as he enters the Mansion House to meet Dublin Lord Mayor Catherine Byrne, smiles as he remembers Milwaukee's museums: one of them, he says, has a cartoon depicting a familiar scene - a young Cudahy falling through the roof of the ambassador's residence.