Quadratic funding of public goods assesses the value of a proposal according to the value voters would derive if the described good were provided. This can fund the implementation or development of the described good, but in an R&D context, it doesn’t fund the (potentially years of) speculative conceptual work done before the good was made legible to the public.
More concretely, imagine that you wanted to fund the development of the WWW this way. You might spend a ton of time thinking about the problems, then publish a paper, then try to raise money to implement the paper. Quadratic funding would primarily be compensating you for the implementation time/costs—not for the “spec work” you did writing the paper. You could recoup some of that cost by raising more to compensate yourself for past work, but it would be hard to go far enough. If you tried to raise too much past the cost of implementation, someone else could offer to implement the white paper more cheaply: they don’t need to pay themselves back for the up-front conceptual work.
If you’re an academic, this could be okay because, say, you have protected salary or a variety of funding sources which paid your salary while you did the up-front conceptual work. The independent researcher trying to fund their work through quadratic funding would need to find some equivalent.
It’s worth noting that the VC-backed startup world seems to do a better job of compensating founders for up-front spec work. You might spend a few years thinking about a problem, then capture your insights in a compelling private demo—not a public paper—for customers / funders. If the prototype reifies original and powerful ideas, that would (in many cases) translate into better terms which effectively compensate you for your spec work. In this path, you might keep your insights private, so that you couldn’t as easily be “scooped” by a team paying only for implementation. The VC path compensates “spec work” with equity. The grant-seeking path seems to make proposers eat up-front costs.
One solution might be to use a strategy common among academics: write grants about work that’s already done; use grant money to fund a future project. Kumar of GitCoin reports that QF rounds seem to additionally compensate project leads according to their past contributions.
This is one answer to To what extent can quadratic funding provision tools for thought?.