The 0-1 knapsack problem is a classical NP complete problem, which has a wide range of applications in real life. In view of the existing algorithms with the shortcoming of low precision in solving 0-1 knapsack problem, an inducing factor monkey algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. The basic idea of the proposed inducing factor monkey algorithm is that an inducing factor is adopted in the climbing process of the basic monkey algorithm to induce it to crawl upward, which can escape from local optimal solution and find the global optimal solution. In the simulation, compared with the existing methods, the results show that the proposed inducing factor monkey algorithm for solving 0-1 knapsack problem is valid.