Sport England will prioritise helping deprived communities and disadvantaged groups to become more active, its new chief executive has said.

In his first interview since taking charge of the quango that allocates £300m of funding to grassroots sport each year, Tim Hollingsworth said the organisation needed to “think and behave differently” to get more people reaping the benefits of exercise.

“We can’t keep offering the same things to the same people,” he told the Guardian. “We have an obligation to ensure that people who don’t find it as easy to access physical activity, such as those in the lower socio-economic groups, disabled people, BAME communities and women and girls, also have an opportunity to get involved.”

Hollingsworth, who has joined Sport England after seven years at the British Paralympic Association, revealed plans to put technology at the heart of a new “Sport 2.0” approach to increase participation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tim Hollingsworth joined Sport England from the British Paralympic Association. Photograph: Adam Davy/PA

He pointed to a recent £3m investment in Beat the Street, a six-week walking, running and cycling game in which players tap boxes with cards to gain points for their schools and win prizes.

Hollingsworth said that in the first four towns to take part, 56% of adult participants moved from inactivity – classified as doing less than 30 minutes of exercise a week – into regular activity.

“We have to be more entrepreneurship on the digital side,” he said. “The principle is that you are taking more of a risk for a great return, because if we carry on doing the same things we will get the same output.”

Hollingsworth said a “lastminute.com for sport”, allowing people to book tennis courts or other sporting facilities in the same way they might a hotel or restaurant, was also in the pipeline.

“It is not quite the silver bullet but it is one of the most fundamental requirements of sport to get right,” he said. “We are working with the Open Data Institute but it is a huge piece of work because we need the entire sector, including sports clubs and local authorities, to understand the benefit of opening up its data.”

Sport England has been attacked for being unable to halt rises in obesity levels and declines in levels of sport participation since the London 2012 Olympics. Hollingsworth said such criticism was “not wholly right, but it is not unfair”. He pointed to the hugely successful This Girl Can campaign, which has helped hundreds of thousands of women get more active, as showing how the organisation could make a difference.

He said he had high hopes for a £100m investment from the exchequer and lottery in 12 pilot schemes designed to help communities in poorer areas develop and test their own plans to get people active. “Some of those solutions might not work and that’s fine as long as we learn from that,” he said.

Hollingsworth insisted he was confident of hitting a government target of getting 500,000 more people exercising regularly by 2020, including 250,000 women and 100,000 from deprived areas, but he accepted more needed to be done.

He pointed out that £3m had been recently given to the parkrun movement to enable it to set up new runs in harder-to-reach communities and £1.5m had been provided for the Daily Mile, the back-to-basics fitness initiative for schoolchildren.

Hollingsworth said Sport England was starting to make some headway with the idea of involving sport and physical activity in the doctor’s surgery and said it had helped to train 12,000 healthcare professionals to provide better information about exercise to patients.

“Across the board, we are focused on demonstrating the transformational impact that sport and activity can have across society, not only on people’s physical wellbeing and mental health, but on societal cohesion,” he said.