After eight years the administration is nearing an end and the Republican and Democratic Party primaries are fast approaching.

Obama's final, fine State of the Union address, delivered on Wednesday, was at least as much an exercise in pre-emptive legacy defence as it was an exercise in laying out a policy agenda for his final year.

Of course Turnbull, his prime ministership still in its infancy, is unlikely to point this out to the leader of the free world.

But what will Obama and Turnbull discuss?

Security, both national and international, will top the agenda when the leaders meet – and not because malcontents such as forgettable former defence minister Kevin Andrews are chipping the Prime Minister about putting troops on the ground in the fight against Islamic State.

Turnbull recognises that Syria is a mess and that more needs to be done to stabilise the country, while also seeking to turn back and ultimately defeat IS, as does Obama.

The resurgence and rise of China will figure prominently, as will the Trans-Pacific trade deal, while Turnbull will also deliver a national security speech to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, arguably the pre-eminent security think tank deep inside the Washington beltway.

It will, in short, be a visit with a "hard national security edge" and likely a rare foray overseas in an election year.

On innovation, Turnbull and Obama – who this week called for a "new moonshot", led by Vice-President Joe Biden, to cure cancer – have much to discuss.

The Coalition's innovation package, released late last year, is designed to inspire the sort of creative destruction and moonshots that are par for the course on the US West Coast in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Mountain View for companies such as Facebook, Google and Tesla.

In nearby Fremont, Tesla in 2010 took over an old GM factory.

Two years later, its first electric cars rolled off the production line in a building as large as 88 American football fields. By 2020, its second and third model vehicles will be on the road, driving semi-autonomously, production will have ramped up from 1000 cars a week to 10,000 (still just a fraction of global annual production of 100 million cars) and it will – the company hopes – be making a healthy profit from the cars.

It is companies like Tesla, and eventually Apple and Google, that Turnbull would like to see Australian entrepreneurs create and emulate.

Former US ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich, a close friend of Obama's, told Fairfax Media on the sidelines of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue in Palo Alto this week that when the pair met they would "find not just common ground, I think it's the same ground when they look at the world and what the most important challenges are for us, going forward".

"What he [Obama] talked about [in the State of the Union address], which is the way in which people will need to be retrained over the course of their working lives, they will likely experience some fantastic things, longer lives but also the challenges that come with that, are very similar themes to what I've heard the Prime Minister talk about."

Bleich, once described by Paul Keating as the finest US envoy sent to our shores, continues.

"The internet is not a left or right thing, it is a resource that society can either take full advantage of or it can be something that, if you resist, you fall behind other nations.

"The same thing is true of sustainable energy sources. Regardless of how you feel about climate change, we have a chance to own the energy of the future, the unlimited, available, lower cost, more healthy energy of the future. Either we race to that and grab it or we will let someone else do it – but the change is going to happen."

The citizens of Australia and the US, residents of advanced, services-oriented democracies and partners in security and counter-terrorism, trade, and geopolitics must both "embrace disruption, recognising that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself".

Labor, to its credit, led the government in embracing the need to rethink innovation policy and will not allow Turnbull to fill the space unchallenged in 2016.

Labor MP Ed Husic, also in Palo Alto for the dialogue, says after three US visits in three years to study innovation "all these cities are now recognising they need to embrace innovation to help transform economic opportunity".

The relevance for his western Sydney seat?

"In my area, places like Blacktown and Woodcroft, they are going to be disrupted by digital upheaval.We can't just sit back and cross our fingers and hope new jobs emerge, we have to actively consider what we can do to improve opportunity."

"We have people who can make a contribution, who can be productive, sidelined."

Labor, he adds, "brings the human element, we think about those people affected by disruption."

It's a key point of difference in policy emphasis, though Husic welcomes the bipartisan embrace of innovation since Turnbull came to power.

And for a Prime Minister facing a full domestic agenda, including major decisions to come on tax and industrial relations reforms, a frontbench reshuffle and sniping from disaffected conservatives, Washington offers an early chance to set out clear markers for the year ahead on defence and security policy.

It also offers the chance for some big-sky thinking and discussions about a favoured policy area – and, potentially, the chance to glean a couple of new ideas, too.

James Massola is Fairfax Media's political correspondent. The Australian-American Leadership Dialogue assisted with the writer's travel costs to its conference in San Francisco.

Mark Kenny is on leave.

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