Collaboratories are increasingly important as instruments for distributed work. They are highly complex socio-technical systems, in which often advanced ICTs need to be carefully tailored to subtle work practices and organizational structures. However, despite their importance and potential impact, not many successful examples of collaboratories exist. One key obstacle is the complexity of the testbed development process in which the collaboratory is to evolve. In this paper, we propose a method for collaboratory improvement. We show how conceptual graph theory can be used to help improve the testbed development process.