Newsflash: Apple Inc. is at the top of Fast Company’s list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” for 2011.

While you recover from the shock of hearing this news, I would like to talk about the other 49 companies which made this year’s list. There are some old names, like Intel and IBM; newer names like Netflix and Facebook; and brand new names like Zynga and Groupon.

What is Zynga you might be asking? Well, that’s their CEO Mark Pincus on the magazine’s cover shown above. Zynga is a San Francisco-based social network game company that Pincus started all the way back in 2007. Today they have over 1,500 employees and attract 300 million people a month to play its online titles on social network sites like Facebook. These same funsters paid Zynga an estimated $500 million on virtual goods in 2010. Fun and games can be profitable.

Groupon takes a good old-fashioned retail coupon concept and marries it with the power of the web. Think of a group coupon, hence “Groupon.” Groupon was launched in November 2008 in Chicago by Andrew Mason, who graduated in 2003 from Northwestern with a degree in music. The idea is to offer one group coupon a day in a given urban area like Chicago. It’s already expanded to 250 markets around the world. Last year, Google offered to buy Groupon for a cool $6 billion. And Groupon said “no.” Mason must feel pretty bullish about his company’s future.

Then there are plenty of non-technology companies that made Fast Company’s list of 50, including Nissan, Burberry, Pepsico and Univision — each finding a way to reinvent itself and/or beat the competition by tapping into its creative side.

In short, innovation continues to thrive all around us. It can thrive at your company as well, whether you are a 5-person shop that has just hatched up a new way to do an old thing; or, you’re an old company that has recently found its innovation mojo.

Let New Lantern help your company get on next year’s list of the 50 most innovative.