Research Project: How has board effectiveness been impacted by diversity of board membership?

++++ The Financial Reporting Council has made some small but significant changes to this project tender. All changes are coloured in blue in the full PDF downloadable further below.

We have extended the scope of Part B of the project to now include socioeconomic diversity. We have also increased the budget for Part B; this is a small increase because we do not envisage the extended scope changing the project processes (e.g. interviews and similar) but we appreciate that some extra analysis will be required.

Part A of the project remains unchanged.

The overall project timeline has been lengthened by one month, and the deadline for submitting your proposal is now Wednesday 11 December 2019. ++++

One of the principles of good governance is that boards should be diverse in their composition. In the context of governance, diversity is a broad concept, encompassing diversity of skills, experience, social background, personal strengths and mindset as well as those protected characteristics of diversity for example, gender, ethnicity and disability.

This research project aims to gather and analyse recent evidence to answer these questions:

1a) How has board effectiveness been impacted by the gender and ethnic diversity of board membership? 1b) How have board effectiveness and dynamics been impacted by the gender, socioeconomic, and ethnic diversity of board membership? 2) What attributes, skills and experience do today's board members expect to be needed in boardrooms of the future? 3) How can nomination committees be helped to take a more objective and diversity-friendly approach to board recruitment?

The customer for the work is the FRC. We would like to receive proposals to investigate these issues effectively using both Part A - a quantitative design (question 1a) and Part B - a qualitative design (questions 1b, 2 and 3).

Suppliers are welcome to bid for either part, or both parts, of the project; the FRC has split the project into two parts because there may be some suppliers who are specialised in one approach but not the other.

• Bids for one or both parts will be assessed equally against the evaluation criteria (there is no inherent disadvantage to bidding for one part only). • Combined bids for Part A and Part B should be discrete (i.e. so that they can be evaluated separately even if the background information about your company or team is the same. • By bidding, you indicate your willingness to undertake either part separately even if you had bid for both parts.

The project is expected to take place between January 2020 and June 2020.

+++ This is only a summary. Please refer to the PDF attachment for the full Invitation to Tender and instructions on how to submit a bid +++

Additional information: CONTRACT AWARD NOTICE *** OPPORTUNITY CLOSED.