The Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production (RICAIP) unlocks the research and innovation capacity of CIIRC CTU and CEITEC BUT, by establishing a strong partnership with prominent German research organizations: DFKI and ZeMA, who jointly contribute to RICAIP by making their core facilities available and enable RICAIP to operate in a distributed way. RICAIP will be established at CIIRC CTU as an international centre operating fully in English. RICAIP will significantly contribute to upgrading the Institute from the national Centre of Excellence (CoE) in areas of informatics, robotics, and cybernetics to the European CoE of artificial intelligence and industrial robotics for advanced industry. For this purpose, RICAIP will build and develop the very first distributed testbed for advanced industrial production (RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core), that serves both academia and companies. The RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core will be established by integration of three local core facilities – the Prague testbed at CIIRC CTU, the Brno testbed at CEITEC BUT (both significantly upgraded by RICAIP), and the existing Saarbrücken Testbed – the joint facility of DFKI and ZeMA. RICAIP represents an international platform for Industry 4.0 scientific challenges as well as addressing current needs, gaps and demands of the industrial sector and society. RICAIP is a trigger for a significant upgrade of the academic and scientific environment. It promotes structural change and strikes against stereotypes and lack of innovative approaches. RICAIP benefits from its prominent governmental support and from traditionally strong industrial ties between Czech and German application sectors. The autonomy of RICAIP is supervised and guaranteed by the external Supervisory body of its stakeholders. The special status of RICAIP implying financial and organisational autonomy within the University is already internally formalised.