The importance of the economy being up to date with the latest developments, such as Industry 4.0, is more evident than ever before. Successful implementation of Industry 4.0 principles requires close cooperation of industry and state authorities with universities. A paradigm of such cooperation is described in this paper stemming from university partners with partly overlapping and partly complementary areas of expertise in manufacturing. Specific areas that are targeted include Additive Manufacturing, cloud computing and control, Virtual Reality, Digital Twins, and Artificial Intelligence. The manufacturing system domains that are served pertaining to process planning and optimization, process and system monitoring, and innovative / precision manufacturing. The described collaborative research and training framework involves a combination of pertinent targeted individual exploratory innovation projects as well as a synthetic multifaceted common research project. Based on these, the research and innovation project knowledge will be transferred to the industry by building a Cluster of Excellence, i.e., a network consisting of academic and industrial stakeholders.