Development Process of Highly Sustainable Comprehensive Community Sports Clubs: Focusing on the Period around 2015

This study focused on highly sustainable comprehensive community sports clubs that collaborate with local stakeholders on regional problems, and clarified their processes for producing sports products and developing club management that led to the creation of products that helped solve regional problems. Interviews were conducted with four individuals: managers and experienced former club advisors of Clubs A and B that met the “sustainable club” criteria. An analysis was conducted by employing Kinoshita’s M-GTA (modified grounded theory approach). This helped design a model diagram to demonstrate the process of creating sport products: a) specific to integrated clubs and b) for solving regional problems ; and to show how the clubs involved themselves in the community based on their size and development stage. It was found that the highly sustainable clubs overcame the resource-constraining environment by not only creating a friendly community through sports but also by leveraging the community of club members with high social capital. This study also suggests that a new market can be developed by shifting the perspective from simply promoting exercise and sports to focusing on community living issues and trying to solve them through sports. These results may contribute to the management knowledge (=innovation) that helps community sports clubs solve regional problems (=sociality) and be profitable (=business) at the same time.