This new preprint is the result of a collaboration initiated during my postdoctoral stay at the Barabasi lab in Boston, which I continued at the LPI as an affiliated professor. In this project, we introduce the synthetic biology competition iGEM as a model system for the Science of Science and Innovation, enabling large-scale “laboratory ethnography.” We present the collection and analysis of laboratory notebooks data from 3,000 teams, which we deposited on the open archive Zenodo. We highlight the organizational characteristics (intra- and inter-team collaboration networks) of teams related to learning and success in the competition. In particular, we emphasize how teams overcome coordination costs as they grow in size, as well as the crystallization of the inter-team collaboration network over time, limiting access to relational capital for peripheral teams. This work is currently funded by an ANR JCJC grant to collect field data and build network models of collaborations and performance.