This paper addresses nonnegative independent component analysis (NICA), with the aim to realize the blind separation of nonnegative well-grounded independent source signals, which arises in many practical applications but is hardly ever explored. Recently, Bertrand and Moonen presented a multiplicative NICA (M-NICA) algorithm using multiplicative update and subspace projection. Based on the principle of the mutual correlation minimization, we propose another novel cost function to evaluate the diagonalization level of the correlation matrix, and apply the multiplicative exponentiated gradient (EG) descent update to it to maintain nonnegativity. An efficient approach referred to as the EG-NICA algorithm is derived and its validity is confirmed by numerous simulations conducted on different types of source signals. Results show that the separation performance of the proposed EG-NICA algorithm is superior to that of the previous M-NICA algorithm, with a better unmixing accuracy. In addition, its convergence speed is adjustable by an appropriate user-defined learning rate.